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Ruben Östlund ’s “Triangle of Sadness” has become one of the more divisive Palme d’Or winners in years. On one side, there are those who think its underlined themes and obvious targets are a bit unrefined and obvious. On the other, there are people who would argue those targets deserve a skewering and the writer/director of “ Force Majeure ” and “The Square” uses his wit to do so with hysterical precision. Given this cinematic cruise almost runs as long as a “three-hour tour,” it's easy to see both sides of this debate. There are undeniably sharp dialogue exchanges and entertaining storytelling twists in Östlund’s takedown of the shallow elite, and yet some of it, especially in the final act, all starts to feel redundant, and maybe even as superficial as the uber-wealthy that the film seeks to tear down. Still, if “Triangle of Sadness” falls short of greatness, it lives comfortably on the tier of goodness, even as it unpacks such bad, bad behavior.

Of course, “Triangle of Sadness” tells a three-act story, the first of which might actually be my favorite. A short film of its own, it introduces us to two dating models, Carl ( Harris Dickinson ) and Yaya ( Charlbi Dean ) at the end of a fancy dinner. The bill has sat there for long enough to make Carl realize that his girlfriend has no intention of paying, even though she said last night she would do so. The two argue about her gender-based assumptions and Östlund’s dialogue spins and swirls as the discussion goes back to the hotel that Yaya notes she’s covering for Carl. This is a very promising prologue for “Triangle of Sadness,” an implication that the movie is going to get into gender roles and transactional relationships in a way that’s sharp and new.

And then it doesn’t quite do that. As I felt he did with “The Square” too, Östlund has a habit of getting distracted by a similar idea without doing the work to tie it back to the previous one in a satisfying way. The mid-section of “Triangle of Sadness” takes place aboard a yacht that Yaya and Carl have been invited to socially promote. (She will take photos of herself with pasta near her mouth but not actually eat it.) It’s here that Östlund plays a little “Upstairs, Downstairs,” introducing us to a crew of people so wealthy that they’ve lost all touch with average reality. Most of them have earned generational wealth through ventures that haven’t exactly bettered the world, such as the kind elderly couple whose fortune comes from grenades or the gentleman who likes to tell people he made his money with shit—he’s a fertilizer magnate. From the beginning of this segment, Östlund is toying with literal levels of society as the rich people sun on the deck above, the white staff celebrate their potential tips in the middle, and the largely non-white staff sits in the hull below.

Östlund's intent plays out in a series of bitter exchanges. A woman ( Mia Benson ) insists that the ship’s sails must be cleaned—the yacht has no sails. Carl gets jealous of a shirtless worker that catches Yaya’s eye and so basically gets him fired. A milquetoast software genius ( Oliver Ford Davies ) comes to life when two pretty women take a photo with him. A passenger ( Sunnyi Melles ) insists that the entire crew go for a swim. In Östlund’s most discomfiting choice, another woman ( Iris Berben ) has been disabled by a stroke and can only repeat the words “In Den Wolken,” which means “In the clouds.” Clearly that's where Östlund thinks most of these people live, far from a grounded reality.

It’s all kind of obvious but it does put down some rich soil for a potential dismantling of societal expectations. These people have clearly been set up to fall from the pedestals on which they live. That comes in the centerpiece of “Triangle of Sadness,” a ridiculous yet riveting sequence in which the passengers sit for a lavish Captain’s Dinner on a stormy night. As Woody Harrelson ’s world-weary captain eats a hamburger instead of whatever concoction the chefs have dreamed up to impress the passengers, Östlund tilts his camera back and forth with the waves, making us feel nearly as nauseous as the characters on-screen. The night devolves into a chaotic expression of bodily fluids that basically tear down all societal structures and sets up the final act, one that reverses roles and puts one of the ship workers (a memorable Dolly De Leon) in a position of unexpected power.

It's hard to shake the feeling that Östlund thinks he’s saying more here than he actually is—I think that pretentious intent is at the root of most on the hate side of this film’s divide—but that didn’t make the film significantly less entertaining as a social satire for me. Östlund is shooting fish in a barrel, but the fish had it coming, and he cooks them up into a tasty meal, complete with sea urchin and squid emulsion on the side. I wish the journey had lived up to its prologue—Carl and Yaya, despite a captivating performance from Dean, become unexpectedly minor players as Östlund becomes more interested in themes than people—but I don’t regret boarding the ship.

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Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

Rated R for language and some sexual content.

149 minutes

Charlbi Dean as Yaya

Harris Dickinson as Carl

Woody Harrelson as Captain Thomas Smith

Zlatko Burić as Dimitry

Henrik Dorsin as Jorma Björkman

Iris Berben as Therese

Sunnyi Melles as Vera

Dolly de Leon as Abigail

Vicki Berlin as Paula

• Ruben Östlund

Cinematographer

• Pauline Hansson
• Mikel Cee Karlsson

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“Triangle of Sadness,” Reviewed: We’re on a Yacht and We’re Puking

By Richard Brody

With his sourly playful satire “Triangle of Sadness,” the Swedish director Ruben Östlund shoots fish in a barrel and displays them with an adventurer’s pride. He takes on the easy targets of the obliviously rich and their glamorous entourages and delivers a handful of café-table insights and would-be outrages that seem calculated to the millimetre. It’s a movie of targeted demagogy that pitches its facile political stances to the preconceptions of the art-house audience; far from deepening those ideas or challenging those assumptions, it flatters the like-minded viewership while swaggering with the filmmaker’s presumption of freethinking, subversive audacity. Of course, “Triangle of Sadness” (which opens Friday in theatres) won the Palme d’Or, the highest prize, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The protagonists are two models, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean). Their relationship is dominated by fights over money, reflecting their profession’s casual precarity. Carl is introduced at an audition where a dozen or more male models wait around, shirtless, while being prepped by a wrangler who has them pose and emote on command; the models alternate between the cheerful expressions that sell mass-market clothing and the dour ones of high-end designer fashion. Carl’s audition is a torment of superficiality and scrutiny. (The title of the film refers to the lines between his eyebrows, and his prospective employers are heard whispering of Botox.) At a fashion show where he’s a spectator, his disposable spot in the scene’s pecking order is emphasized in a runway-show kerfuffle over seating. It’s in such moments that Östlund’s surest manner is revealed: at his best, he’s a filmmaker of fine points—delicate indicia of poignant humiliations exposing characters to cruel truths about themselves—which he realizes in scenes and images of a clean precision. (The scene that revolves around seating, featuring a long, slow tracking shot, could have been part of a silent film.)

But Östlund’s strongest suit and his strongest inclination are in conflict with each other; his keen observations are submerged in his efforts at social criticism and political philosophy. When Yaya and Carl fight over picking up the check at a fancy restaurant, the extended proceedings discharge their meaning in a pair of quickly delivered lines: Carl says that she makes much more money than he does; Yaya responds that her career is likely shorter, especially if she gets pregnant. The film is sardonic about modelling, but there’s nothing satirical in its view of the business or of the couple’s self-aware place in it. The movie attempts to expands its range with Yaya’s side job as a social-media influencer, which gets the pair a cabin on a yacht cruise for a self-selecting handful of the blithely wealthy, but this plot turn, which takes over the film, prompts Östlund to transform his cast of characters into a sociological cross-section of secondhand types.

The emblem of the cruise is the team of assault-weapon-toting guards who are conspicuously posted on the deck. The belowdecks crews of manual laborers are almost all nonwhite—the cleaning crew comprises mainly Southeast Asian women, and the engine-room workers mostly Black and brown men. As the cruise gets under way, the service staff, a dozen or so young white people in crisp, white-shirted uniforms, meets under the command of the cheerily martial Paula (Vicki Berlin), who exhorts them to say “Yes, sir,” and “Yes, Ma’am,” with hearty enthusiasm, and to never say no to anything—even if a guest is requesting an illicit substance or a “unicorn.” (Unfortunately, this elaborate scene adds little to a similar one , of staffers at a summer hotel-resort, in Busby Berkeley ’s “ Gold Diggers of 1935 ”—complete with its race-based distinctions.)

Not only does “Triangle of Sadness” mock Yaya’s work as an influencer; it sets up Carl and Yaya as frivolous wannabes, even riper for a takedown than the rich with whom they hobnob, because they enjoy the same privileges without selling their souls but merely their images. The hollow simulacra of humans surrounding them on this ship of fools include Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), a Russian oligarch who boasts of selling “shit,” i.e., fertilizer; plus a British arms merchant named Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) and his wife, Clementine (Amanda Walker), who lament the international ban on land mines and its effect on their fortune. There’s also a friendless software creator (Henrik Dorsin) and a haughty woman (Mia Benson) who insists that the ship’s sails need washing. (The ship has no sails.) In a characterization that reveals Östlund’s crass sense of humor, there’s a running joke about a woman named Therese (Iris Berben), who is disabled by a stroke and aphasic, able only to call her husband by name and speak the phrase “ in den Wolken ” (“in the clouds”).

The protagonist of the voyage is the yacht’s captain (Woody Harrelson), an alcoholic who stays locked in his cabin, drunk, blaring a recording of the “Internationale” while reading leftist texts (he declares that he’s not a Communist but a Marxist) and ignoring the entreaties of his crew. The result of his neglect is the scheduling of a formal dinner for all guests on the night of a storm; the ship rocks wildly in the waves, leading to a tragicomic epidemic of seasickness, complete with projectile vomiting and a literal shitstorm erupting from the vessel’s toilets. Spoiler alert: it sounds like more fun than it looks. Östlund may not hesitate to make his characters miserable, but he spares the audience (or, rather, keeps an eye on the box-office), making sure that the excremental scenes stay well short of revulsion; their grossness remains theoretical.

A handful of small-scale scenes deliver quiet but sharp jabs to viewers’ ribs regarding the cavalier display of casual power. Carl, jealous of Yaya’s wink at a shirtless and handsome deckhand (Timoleon Gketsos), salves his pique by lodging a petty complaint to Paula, only to witness the punitive results. Dimitry’s wife, Vera (Sunnyi Melles), making a spectacle of her egalitarian sympathies, tries to reverse roles by ordering a crew member (Alicia Eriksson) to abandon her duties. (The logical conundrum is quick and cutting.) But Östlund’s grandiose sensibility unfortunately dominates the film, both in its political bombast (as in a scene of the captain and Dimitry drinking wildly while trading leaden political witticisms; Dimitry’s rely on the collected works of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) and in the major pivot that occurs midway through. I won’t spoil this much, except to say that a motley batch of passengers and crew members end up stranded on a deserted island, forced into raw survivalism in a state just above that of nature, where money is useless and power relationships are drastically altered in ways that are utterly unsurprising and commonplace, even if they do lead to a clever trick ending.

Only the fine cast lends life to the movie’s superficial caricatures, even if the hectic, blatant script edges the performances toward the clattery side and Östlund’s precise but stiff direction leaves little room for inventiveness. In particular, Berlin’s rendition of authoritarian cheer and Dolly de Leon’s steadfast assertiveness as a long-suffering staffer leave high-relief impressions. As Clementine, the munitions-maker’s spouse, Walker delivers the best line in the film, with the perfect blithering lilt. Above all, the movie’s cast is shadowed by Charlbi Dean’s death , in August, from a lung infection, at the age of thirty-two. Although “Triangle of Sadness” sticks closer to Carl, the mercurial, elusive Yaya is the dramatic engine of the film, which would be nearly inert without Dean’s labile, coolly impulsive performance. If nothing else, the movie would have assured her stardom; there’s no telling how many characters and films her death foreclosed before their conception. ♦

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Triangle of Sadness

A fashion model celebrity couple join an eventful cruise for the super-rich. A fashion model celebrity couple join an eventful cruise for the super-rich. A fashion model celebrity couple join an eventful cruise for the super-rich.

• Ruben Östlund
• Thobias Thorwid
• Harris Dickinson
• Charlbi Dean
• 591 User reviews
• 283 Critic reviews
• 63 Metascore
• 24 wins & 78 nominations total

• Handsome Crew Man

• The Captain

• (as Zlatko Burić)

• Yacht Steward

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Charlbi Dean unexpectedly died shortly after the film's release from sepsis, which was caused by the bacteria called Capnocytophaga. This was complicated by the fact that she had lost her spleen several years before in a car accident. She was just 32.
• Goofs First time we see Therese, she has right sided hemiplegia and aphasia both consistent with a left brain infarct. When she is pulled to shore, her hemiplegia switches sides and for the rest of the movie she has left hemiplegia.

Clementine : [picking up a live grenade] Winston, look. Isn't this one of ours?

• Alternate versions Release in two versions, one for general worldwide release, and an edited cut for People's Republic of China. Respective runtimes are "2h 27m (147 min)" and "2h 13m (133 min) (Mainland China Censored Version) (China)".
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: The Most Theatre Walkouts I've EVER Seen | Cannes 2022 Explained (2022)
• Soundtracks Born Free Written by M.I.A. (as Maya Arulpragasam), Dave Taylor, Alan Vega , Martin Rev and John Hill Performed by M.I.A. © Concord Copyrights London Ltd, Saturn Strip Ltd, Switch Werd Music/Rodeoman Music © WC Music Corp. administered by Warner Chappell Music Scandinavia P 2010 Licensed courtesy of XL Recordings Ltd

User reviews 591

• DominosthroughAgrate
• Nov 12, 2022
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• September 18, 2022 (Greece)
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Switzerland
• Official Neonrated (United States)
• Triangle of Sadness: Đáy Thượng Lưu
• Chiliadou beach, Evoia, Greece (group stranded on the beach)
• Imperative Entertainment
• Plattform Produktion
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• €10,000,000 (estimated)
• Oct 9, 2022
• $26,214,659

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 27 minutes
• Dolby Atmos

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Triangle of Sadness review: A wicked class satire at sea

It's hell or high water in the outrageous latest from the sly Swedish filmmaker behind Force Majeure and The Square.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Money talks, and beauty walks — it dips and spins, twirls and sashays, and stares lovingly into its own void — in Triangle of Sadness , an acid, sun-drenched satire from the incurable Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund. Like his previous outing, 2017's The Square , Triangle drills down gleefully on privileged lives thrown suddenly into crisis; like that movie, too, it took the top prize at Cannes , the Palme d'Or. Östlund is the kind of auteur that European festivals adore: a sexy agitator who dresses his critiques of gender, class, and power in the language of lush visuals and high-gloss cringe comedy. Triangle , in theaters Oct. 7, may be his least subtle film (certainly less than his 2014 breakout, the taut ski-holiday nightmare Force Majeure ), but it's also his most absurdly entertaining, and possibly his best shot so far at a mainstream American crossover.

The director has two near-perfect muses in Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean as Carl and Yaya, a fashion-model couple whose almost obscene aesthetic symmetry doesn't necessarily translate to their relationship. He's gorgeous and needy, a paragon of talky Gen-Z anxiety; she's gorgeous and a little bit ruthless, a social Darwinist with a low tolerance for Carl's constant tsunami of feelings. Somewhere in between bookings, they've accepted a trip on a luxury super-yacht — Yaya's also an influencer, so it's all expenses paid — and made enough peace to carry on for a while, as long as Carl stays obligingly quiet and takes all the "casual" bikini snaps she needs for her feed.

The other guests are mostly older, and more accustomed to the dividends of extreme wealth: a jolly clown-haired Russian named Dmitry (Zlatko Buriić) who made his millions in fertilizer; the wheelchair-bound Therese (Iris Berben), debilitated by a stroke but still alert to everything; Jorma (Henrik Dorson), a balding, awkward tech wizard. There's even a genteel pair of British retirees (Amanda Walker and Oliver Ford Davies) who look like they should be on a box of tea — though in fact, they explain cheerfully, their money comes from munitions (you know, just regular peace-keeping stuff like hand grenades and I.E.D.s). The bright-eyed staff who serve them all, overseen by a diligent ice-blonde manager called Paula (Vicki Berlin), are accommodating to a fault; no detail is too small, no guest request too petty or outrageous to be met. But what's going on with the captain ( Woody Harrelson )? He won't come out for dinner in his dress uniform, and there's a whole lot of liquor bottles and old socialist literature clanging around in his quarters.

Harrelson, once he emerges, looks like he hasn't enjoyed himself this much on screen in a long time, though it's better to know as little as possible about what transpires after the movie's midway point — except that there's a reason little airsick bags were left, winkingly, on every chair in early press screenings. (The story behind the title, too, is too good to spoil, though the explanation for that comes gratifyingly early on.) The tone and setting shift significantly in the film's back end — it's meant to be jarring, and it is — but that narrative swerve also gives Filipina actress Dolly de Leon a chance to shine as Abigail, a middle-aged custodial worker on the ship who may have a better read on Machiavelli and trade economics than anyone.

Hers is the kind of stealth performance that awards-season breakouts are made of, and Dickinson and Dean are consistently fun as archetypes whose flaws are actually articulated; they're messy, mercurial canvases for the director, not just beautiful blanks. ( Dean died suddenly last month at 32 , which adds a strange bittersweet postscript to her presence here.) Östlund's sense of irony can sometimes veer toward the obvious or flat-footed; his targets — the self-regarding follies of the uber-rich, the inanity of social media, beauty as currency — are so broad and shiny that the occasional dip feels almost inevitable. But Triangle hits more marks than it misses, and in a somber, often underwhelming season of would-be arthouse hits, the movie is a bona-fide trip: not the funhouse mirror we need for these ridiculous times, maybe, but one we deserve. Grade: B+

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Screen Rant

Triangle of sadness review: a sharp, deranged & beautifully hilarious satire.

Triangle of Sadness is a scathing takedown of influencers & wealth hoarders, the most deranged episode of Below Deck Bravo wishes they produced.

"Can you relax your triangle of sadness?" a casting agent asks Carl in the opening moments of Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or-winning film. Carl is at a casting call for a so-called "grumpy brand," one where its models can look down on their consumers. Someone filming the models makes them switch from their Balenciaga faces to H&M faces, a slight frown and a furrowed brow turned to a slash of pearly white teeth and dimples. Written by Östlund, whose film The Square also won the Palme, Triangle of Sadness is a visceral and scathingly hilarious takedown of models, influencers, and wealth hoarders and while it threatens to buckle under its lofty ambitions, its three-act story becomes the most deranged episode of Below Deck Bravo wishes they could have produced.

Triangle of Sadness begins with Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) navigating the world of high-end fashion and social media influence . They bicker over who is paying the check ( "Should I take out my little calculator and tap tap tap?" asks Yaya before her card is declined), but they come together under the guise of an honest conversation, which is more of an excuse for them to throw barbs at each other and examine the power dynamics at play in their relationship. Eventually, they end up on a $250 million luxury yacht cruise, captained by self-proclaimed Marxist Thomas Smith (Woody Harrelson). Surrounded by couples with real capital (not just social capital), Carl and Yaya are out of their element when a storm sends them into a disgusting and unhinged mess.

Related: Best Movies Of 2022

Östlund has his sights set on the uber wealthy with Triangle of Sadness , emphasizing the power dynamics that money forces to the surface of seemingly pleasant encounters. A patron on the yacht asks the employee serving them champagne to get into the hot tub, which turns into the entire crew taking the water slide into the ocean and pushing the captain's dinner back by 30 minutes. Captain Thomas Smith and Russian Dimitry (Zlatko Buric) exchange rapid-fire quotes extolling the virtues of socialism and capitalism, respectively. While the guests on the yacht vomit and the toilets overflow into the halls, they're throwing around the words of Karl Marx, Mark Twain, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan over glasses of whiskey. Eventually, even Thomas laments his status as a "real" Marxist, saying he has too much material property to even consider himself one. While it comes across as a bit heavy-handed at times, Östlund's direction serves as a grounding tool amidst the chaos — and what beautiful chaos it is.

Triangle of Sadness takes its name from the area of the face above the nose and between the eyebrows where wrinkles occur and botox needles are injected. Halfway through the film's second act, though, it recalls another famous triangle, one of the Bermuda variety. While the first half of Triangle of Sadness works perfectly well as a satirical , if familiar, send-up of wealth and beauty, it's the second half of the film that Östlund finds his true sweet spot. Power dynamics expand and contract as characters are forced together and pulled apart. To say much more would delve into spoiler territory, but once some yacht-goers arrive at a lush tropical island, that's when the real fun begins.

It's also when Triangle of Sadness ' best character gets to shine. Dolly De Leon's Abigail, mostly seen in glimpses as a cleaner on the yacht, steps forward and, à la Captain Phillips , declares herself the captain now. In a just world, she would be the Best Supporting Actress front-runner to beat but, as it stands, she's just one of the best parts of one of the best films of the year. At just around two and a half hours long, Triangle of Sadness does drag at times and Östlund has said that the initial runtime of the film was almost four hours. The three-act structure of the film ultimately saves it, with each section providing a change of scenery that is both jolting and illuminating, putting the relationships between the characters into new contexts.

In making such an expansive film, Östlund has tackled his subject matter from all sides. While it may not be as sharp as previous efforts like The Square or Force Majeure , there's something about the bluntness of it that works in conjunction with his vision. When it gets to be too on the nose, Östlund seems to know what he's doing. It's all just as showy as the capitalists that the film is indicting. From the yacht to the fashion to the dishes served at the captain's dinner before hell broke loose, there's nothing subtle about Triangle of Sadness — that's why it works.

Next: Every Movie Coming To Theaters In October 2022

Triangle of Sadness is now playing in theaters. The film is 150 minutes long and rated R for language and some sexual content.

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Triangle of Sadness review – heavy-handed satire on the super-rich loses its shape

The new film from Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund takes aim at obvious targets, and makes a mess of hitting them

S adness of some shape will now perhaps forever be associated with this satire which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival: its beautiful young star Charlbi Dean died in August of a freak infection. Her scenes are impressive, but the film itself is bafflingly overrated: strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure , or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square . This film, on the other hand, congratulates itself deafeningly on being against the cruelty of the global super-rich, against the trite culture of fashion, against the vapidity of social media influencers. It uses a howitzer to shoot drugged fish in a barrel, inserts flabby lite-surrealism where the comedy might otherwise go and the plot turns out to be a retread of JM Barrie’s stage-play The Admirable Crichton .

Everything of interest happens in the first ten minutes. A male model called Carl (Harris Dickinson) senses after a calamitous audition that his career is already on the rocks, all washed up. One of the art directors makes a mean comment about his “triangle of sadness”: the frowny zone just above his eyebrows. Later he has a furious row with his Instagram princess/model girlfriend Yaya (Dean) because in her selfish Anna Delvey-esque way, she expects him to pick up the bill.

Perhaps to mollify him, Yaya takes Carl on a free luxury cruise she’s got courtesy of her millions of followers, and they duly make the acquaintance of all the dysfunctional, boorish and anomie-stricken super-rich on board, including a hateful elderly Brit couple with the Churchillian names of Winston and Clementine. There is a German woman who has suffered a stroke, cannot move unaided and can say nothing but the phrase “in der Wolken” – “in the clouds” – which towards the film’s end looks as if it might facilitate a nifty plot twist, but doesn’t. The captain (Woody Harrelson) is having a breakdown; the chief steward Paula (Vicky Berlin) is a tyrant, and everyone looks down on the toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly De Leon). Could it be that all these capitalist enablers are heading for a Bermuda triangle of sadness in their ship of fools?

At first, Östlund shrewdly conveys the architectural strangeness of this floating city-state, and how the anxiety and unease of its inhabitants has been projected outwards into the physical form around them: the walls, the deck, the pool. But then we are stuck with some really broad and tired second-hand satire and cartoony stereotypes, borrowing a bit from Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe from 1973, or the horrible Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life , and of course the much-filmed The Admirable Crichton. This is another of those films which are intent on telling you what you already know, and not deploying much in the way of comedy or originality to do it.

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Triangle Of Sadness Review

28 Oct 2022

Triangle Of Sadness

Ruben Östlund loves to take the piss. The Swedish director has made a habit of it in his films, delivering scathing satires of family dynamics ( Force Majeure ) or the pretensions of the art world ( The Square ). This time, the effective enfant terrible of European cinema trains his eye on the wealthy and the privileged, though perhaps not in quite the way you would think; his sixth film is as much a farcical comedy as it is a searing indictment.

The film is divided into three distinct chapters. The first act establishes a very modern supermodel power couple, Carl ( Harris Dickinson ) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean, tragically her final film role), and Östlund’s script delights in poking fun at the fatuousness and status anxieties of the fashion world. (It’s here that the film gets its title — derived from a term casting agents use to describe a triangular area of the face supposedly most prone to wrinkles.)

Then, in the film’s middle section, the couple set sail for a trip on a luxury yacht, invited there for their influencer clout: new money, contrasted with old money. The Insta-influencers rub shoulders with aristocratic Brits who politely explain their family business is in weapons of mass destruction, plus a drooling Russian oligarch (deliciously played by Croatian-Danish actor Zlatko Burić — an oligarch specialist) who made his fortune in waste management, the self-described "king of shit".

Östlund’s filmmaking is pointed, almost sarcastic, and about as subtle as a gold-encrusted sledgehammer.

Finally, when disaster strikes the boat, the third act becomes its own thing entirely, and the film turns into an examination of what happens when the status quo of power, class and currency is recalibrated. Throughout, Östlund’s filmmaking is pointed, almost sarcastic, and about as subtle as a gold-encrusted sledgehammer; there’s nothing either discreet or charming about these bourgeoisie. But it is confidently delivered and enjoyably presented, a vigorously compelling riot of gaudiness. It’s almost like watching a nature documentary: you can’t help but be fascinated and repelled by these grotesque, alien creatures.

The carnival of excess is all staged with immense immediacy — never more so than in the central, 15-minute set-piece of the film. It begins with a captain’s dinner of the ocean’s most unappetising seafood during a stormy night; it ends with nearly all the passengers falling victim to violent sickness and diarrhoea, filmed with the kind of explicit scatological fireworks that would make Monty Python’s Mr Creosote blush. No filmmaker has ever before depicted the inglorious act of coming-out-at-both-ends with such disgusting lucidity.

As the walkouts at its Cannes premiere would suggest, this is arthouse comedy at its most juvenile; filthily fun as they are, sequences like that have about as much depth as a toilet bowl. But it is far too enjoyable a ride to care too much: as the cost-of-living crisis deepens and a recession looms, there’s something acutely cathartic in watching the guts of rich people being emptied out for our pleasure.

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Triangle of sadness, common sense media reviewers.

Bold satire has strong language, adult themes, drinking.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Power is likely to be abused. Wealth can lead to a

Very few positive qualities to characters, particu

Film pokes fun at society and racism within, such

Character has suspected heart attack on-screen. Pa

Brief sexual activity beneath sheets. Kissing and

Frequent language includes "f---ing," "f--k," "s--

The film's main objective is poking fun at the sup

Characters drink wine, champagne, and spirits. Cha

Parents need to know that Triangle of Sadness is an impressive satirical drama that takes aim at the super rich and has strong language, sex, drinking, and smoking. It centers on a group of wealthy people -- including celebrity model couple Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) -- on a trip aboard a…

Positive Messages

Power is likely to be abused. Wealth can lead to a sense of unearned privilege. Hierarchy can change with circumstances, so don't rest on your laurels.

Positive Role Models

Very few positive qualities to characters, particularly the rich ones, who show unscrupulous, headonistic behavior. Those working on the ship display more humanity, but even they focus on the large tips they'll get if they treat passengers well. Ship worker Abigail shows intelligence and physical capability, though her philosophy of power eventually leads to manipulative and egotistical behavior.

Diverse Representations

Film pokes fun at society and racism within, such as above deck workers on the boat all being White, while those with more menial jobs are Black, Filipino, and Eastern Mediterranean. A character assumes another is a pirate because he is Black. The plot sees a Filipino character outsmart the rich passengers and claim control at one point. Touches on and challenges the notion of gender roles in a discussion about men traditionally paying for dinner. Later a character congratulates another for "domesticating the old, alpha males." A character in a wheelchair with limited speech is shown to be confident and ask for what she wants, though is sometimes sidelined by other characters. Stereotypical Russian oligarch, who talks about money and prioritizes wealth, taking expensive jewelry off a dead body at one stage.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Character has suspected heart attack on-screen. Passing mention of defibrillators and stroke. People on boat carry rifles. Large explosion. Drowned bodies shown on-screen. Mention of war, hand grenades, land mines, bombs, and mangled bodies. Characters suffer from severe sickness (vomit, diarrhea), fall down stairs, and are thrown about the ship in bad weather. Scary animal noise at night. Donkey bludgeoned to death with rock, resulting in blood on character's clothing. A character lifts a rock as though to hit another.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief sexual activity beneath sheets. Kissing and touching on bed. Naked character on toilet (genitals not in shot). Non-sexual nudity includes naked character shown from behind and breast exposed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent language includes "f---ing," "f--k," "s--t," "bulls--t," "piss," and "a--hole." "Jesus" and "goddammit" used as exclamations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The film's main objective is poking fun at the super-rich who are shown to live absurdly lavish lifestyles. Characters are shown to be overly consumed with money and expensive items. Brands mentioned or seen on-screen include H&M, Balenciaga, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Evian, and Nutella. Mention of €25,000 engagement ring and $250 million luxury yacht, which is the setting for much of the film.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink wine, champagne, and spirits. Characters seen visibly drunk, including during a drinking game, which results in behavior that endangers other passengers. Characters also smoke cigarettes on numerous occasions.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Triangle of Sadness is an impressive satirical drama that takes aim at the super rich and has strong language, sex, drinking, and smoking. It centers on a group of wealthy people -- including celebrity model couple Carl ( Harris Dickinson ) and Yaya ( Charlbi Dean ) -- on a trip aboard a luxury yacht that goes awry. It is a social commentary that deals with mature themes such as the ethics of arms dealing and mentions socialism, capitalism, and Marxism. There is strong language including "f--k" and "s--t" and characters smoke and are seen visibly drunk on a number of occasions. Brands are mentioned and shown on-screen including Rolex, Evian, and Louis Vuitton. There is a protracted scene involving projectile vomiting and diarrhea, and the bludgeoning to death of an animal, as well as drowned bodies on-screen. Brief sexual activity is portrayed beneath the sheets and brief partial nudity is also shown. Mature themes and a lengthy runtime make this suitable for adults and older teens, particularly those who enjoy dark, knife-sharp humor. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Sadistic Satire

Animal violence, what's the story.

In TRIANGLE OF SADNESS, a group of wealthy people, including model power couple Carl ( Harris Dickinson ) and Yaya ( Charlbi Dean ), set sail aboard a luxury yacht. But a drunk captain ( Woody Harrelson ) and an unexpected chain of events change the course of the trip dramatically.

Is It Any Good?

Fans of Ruben Östlund 's unique style of social criticism will find much to like here as he skewers the super rich over some pretty fiery flames. While his 2014 breakout Force Majeure took aim at gender politics, and his previous Cannes winner The Square offered a long hard look at the elitism and hypocrisy of the art world, we're in perhaps more familiar comedy territory this time, as Triangle of Sadness sends up its smug, unsuspecting characters before sending them truly crashing down.

The now infamous dinner scene, that resulted in numerous walkouts at Cannes -- the same festival at which the film took home the coveted Palme d'Or -- will make or break it for many, depending how strong their stomachs. But elsewhere there are more subtle touches and standout performances. These include Harrelson's inebriated captain, standing at a slant and spouting Marxist theory and Dolly De Leon as below-deck worker Abigail, who turns the tables in a satisfying way, and offers one of few people to borderline root for, even as she descends into her own power-hungry darkness.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what Triangle of Sadness had to say about wealth and power. How were power dynamics portrayed? What were they based on? How did they change during the course of the film?

The film touches on stereotypes to poke fun at different kinds of wealthy people. What stereotypes did you notice? Discuss the use of stereotypes in movies -- can you see positive and negative aspects of playing into them, particularly for the purpose of comedy?

Many of the characters were unlikable. How did it feel watching characters with few redeeming qualities? Did it affect your experience and how much you cared about the outcome?

Discuss the strong language used in the movie. What did it contribute to the movie? Is a certain kind of language expected in a movie like this?

How was drinking and smoking depicted in the film? Were they glamorized? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 7, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : April 25, 2023
• Cast : Charlbi Dean , Harris Dickinson , Woody Harrelson
• Director : Ruben Östlund
• Studio : Neon
• Genre : Comedy
• Run time : 147 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language and some sexual content
• Last updated : October 31, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Triangle of Sadness Movie Review: Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or Winning Satire Struggles to Fire on All Cylinders

When a film wins the Palme d’Or, the expectations become clear. Realistically, it could be the first steppingstone towards a best picture race. More recently, being awarded Cannes’ feature prize has meant praise for the cutting edge, arthouse style that both shocks and befuddles an audience going in without any prior warning of the film’s performance. For context, the last few Palme d’Or winners are Titane and Parasite , so that is quite a high bar. These two films alone serve as an example for the duality for Cannes’ most prestigious festival award. In 2022, the film went to Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness – a not-so-nuanced satire poking at class divide that tries to fit into both of the aforementioned buckets.

On one hand, Triangle of Sadness contributes the same darkly humor that previous winners were praised for. Unfortunately, though, the film doesn’t offer nearly the same palette of commentary and lasting power.

Perhaps these expectations are what makes Östlund’s latest such a confusing and strikingly uneven watch. It offers the same intellectual food-for-thought as its mainstream counterparts (ironic that this film hits VOD relatively close to The Menu hitting theaters given both of their absurdist takes on elitist culture) but in a package rather unfulfilling by its third act.

The film starts strong and quite heavy-handed as a pair of social media influencers, masquerading as a happy couple, begin pointing fingers over a bill at a prestigious restaurant. Within this opening sequence, Östlund sets the table for every course this film is planning to present. The two leads in Triangle of Sadness are Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean (who tragically passed not too long after this film’s premiere at Cannes). Both fit quite nicely with the narrative arch the script sets up – even if both tend to float in and out of the script as a large supporting cast dominates the latter half of the film.

The film’s third leading performance, which you soon find out isn’t really a leading performance and surely wouldn’t even constitute enough screentime for a supporting nod at next year’s Academy Awards ceremony, is the delightful and quite drunk Woody Harrelson . His scenes stick out as some of the film’s best, but when the third chapter rolls around, you start to notice your own stomach growling as the film struggles to ground itself in an otherwise outlandish set of circumstances.

Reviews for Movies like Triangle of Sadness

And by outlandish, I mean outlandishly gross. Triangle of Sadness , if for nothing else, has perhaps the grossest and crassest set of scenes that you will lay your eyes on this year. Östlund loves to make his actors, and audience members, squirm and readjust as much as possible. As the film begins to turn towards a third act set on a deserted island, the “gross-out” factor that deservedly helped market this film to a wider audience, or turn off that same wider audience (depending how you want to examine its middling box office performance), is nowhere to be seen. And when this flip happens, the film dies on a sword it never should have come in contact with.

Triangle of Sadness has a finely constructed first 90 minutes. Its unobtrusive camera shots, dry-as-hell line delivery, and wicked set or principles are enough to chew on. But the flickering light it has meticulously set up soon burns out with the ship it’s resting on. Satire needs to be one of two things – sharp or nuanced. The best satires are both. Triangle of Sadness fails in being either at a successful pace. To say it’s ambitious is an understatement, but to say that it successfully uses up every minute of its 2 hour, 20 minute runtime would be an overstatement.

Although it’s visually pleasing and pretty refreshing at its peak moments, Triangle of Sadness doesn’t come together as tight as it should. For many filmmakers, winning a Palme d’Or would be a reason to stay the course for the foreseeable future, but Ruben Östlund keeps audiences guessing. He didn’t hit a home run here, but I can surely admire the effort and vision that he is trying to complete. It probably won’t compete for many awards this upcoming season, but I imagine Östlund will be back for a vengeance.

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Where to watch Triangle of Sadness: Hulu, VOD

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Triangle of Sadness Cast and Credits

Harris Dickinson as Carl

Charlbi Dean as Yaya

Woody Harrelson as Thomas, The Captain

Zlatko Burić as Dimitry

Vicki Berlin as Paula

Dolly de Leon as Abigail

Director: Ruben Östlund

Writer: Ruben Östlund

Cinematography: Fredrik Wenzel

Editors: Ruben Östlund ,  Mikel Cee Karlsson

Triangle of Sadness movie on Letterboxd

Triangle of Sadness movie on IMDb

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‘Triangle of Sadness’ Review: Ruben Östlund’s Beauty Satire Is Bent All Out of Shape

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Cannes  Film Festival. Neon releases the film in theaters on Friday, October 7.

It’s been a long two years since audiences ran away from the American remake of “ Force Majeure ” like it was a killer avalanche cascading towards their families, so perhaps Ruben Östlund — the rascally Swedish filmmaker whose other features include “Play” and 2017’s Cannes-winning, take-no-prisoners caricature of the art world, “ The Square ” — has just forgotten that other people are perfectly capable of making toothless, watered-down versions of Ruben Östlund movies. He may have dug that particular hole, but he’s under no obligation to fill it himself.

Alas, the much-anticipated “ Triangle of Sadness ” — which features Woody Harrelson as the alcoholic communist captain of an 100-meter superyacht once owned by Aristotle Onassis, and which ought to be Östlund’s most hostile and ambitious comedy yet — is frustratingly obtuse by the time it even leaves port.

It’s no secret that the Palme d’Or is a prize heavy enough to anchor certain filmmakers in place, but it also seems fair to assume that a two-and-a-half-hour class satire from a major artist will be sharper than an episode of “Below Deck,” even if that show is ruthlessly brilliant across all four of its different incarnations. That “Triangle of Sadness” is more coherent than “Film Socialisme” and shorter than “Titanic” only does so much to keep it from sinking towards the bottom of my Movies About a Bunch of Rich Weirdos Aboard a Big-Ass Boat list on Letterboxd, right below “The Cat’s Meow” and just above “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.”

If not for such high expectations, “Triangle of Sadness” surely wouldn’t feel like so much of a wash. Each of its three chapters, which bob into each other like dinghies that’ve been hastily tied to the same dock during a hurricane, offer ample opportunity for Östlund to poke fun at the empty promise of financial equality in a world where even the bodies we’re born into command different economic value. The film’s title might allude to the wrinkle of skin between your eyebrows, but that pyramidal geometry more pressingly refers to Östlund’s fascination with social hierarchies — and the glee he takes in flipping them upside down, as if that alone might be enough to see them in a new light.

It starts, as all movies should, in the world of high-end male modeling. A muted and dangerously almost-smart Derek Zoolander type who Harris Dickinson plays to perfection, the 25-year-old Carl is reaching the geriatric stage of his career, and the anxiety over his economic future is starting to make his eight-pack look two abs short. A merciful society would simply euthanize Carl rather than make him suffer the slow indignity of losing Instagram followers — and spare us the unpleasantness of having to look upon this hideous creature for another 145 minutes — but the fashion industry is not so kind. Instead, Carl finds himself without a seat at his supermodel girlfriend Yaya’s latest runway show (she’s played by Charlbi Dean), and then haggling with her, exhaustingly, over the dinner bill later that night.

These opening scenes contain occasional glimpses of the impish wit that Östlund has long deployed against male insecurities, and he still loves to watch men squirm their way through pained surrenders of gendered power. On the strength of its staging alone, one bit in which Carl and Yaya fling money at each other while arguing across the opposite sides of a closing elevator door almost manages to generate the same friction that makes Östlund’s previous work so wonderfully itchy. For the most part, however, the director’s freeform approach to screenwriting comes up short this time, as his actors sulk and spon-con their way through a quixotic search for parity amid capitalism.

The situation threatens to improve when Carl and Yaya arrive on the superyacht they’ll share with Russian fertilizer billionaires and a couple of kindly British arms dealers (the models’ passage has been paid for in #ads). You don’t really have to see “Triangle of Sadness” to imagine what kind of shenanigans Östlund indulges once his movie is at sea. It’s all too possible that nothing in the vast “Triangle of Sadness” is funnier than the prolonged sequence in which a whole-ass helicopter is hired to airdrop a jar of Nutella onto the boat just so that one rich passenger doesn’t have to be without her precious hazelnut spread.

Privilege is seen warping behavior in all sorts of predictable ways, from the cringey (Carl’s sexual insecurity leads to an issue with a swarthy deckmate) to the exasperating (one noxious woman orders the ship’s entire staff to go for a “fun” swim in order to assuage her guilt over their servitude). Everyone has a role to play, even if all the parts are ultimately circumstantial, and every relationship is a business arrangement, even if all the people in them are able to convince themselves otherwise.

It’s only the richest passengers who can afford to act on their own terms. At first I assumed the cute old war mongers were so polite in order to make themselves better about blowing people up for profit, but then they openly bemoan the “hard times” when they couldn’t sell enough landmines (the influence of Noam Chomsky’s “The Way the World Works” is so immense that the book’s eventual appearance on screen feels like when a movie Avenger shows up to legitimize one of Marvel’s rinky-dink Disney Plus shows). Perhaps that façade would be harder to maintain if these two sweet death-dealers didn’t look like they could play Hugh Grant’s parents in a Richard Curtis rom-com.

That disconnect between form and function is reflected in the austerity of Östlund’s filmmaking, which continues to flatten broad comedy beats under the weight of Haneke-severe compositions. With the exception of the movie’s centerpiece sequence — a seasick eruption of shit and vomit so intense that it manages to engender sympathy for some of the worst people in the world — “Triangle of Sadness” appears determined to suck the laughter out of every scene. The only thing Östlund’s po-faced characters can’t afford is to recognize the absurdity inherent to their lives, and so the movie keeps our response muted to a low chuckle, as if anything louder might reach the people on screen and cause the whole charade to fall apart.

That applies to the working-class characters as well, though “Triangle of Sadness” is sometimes more acutely satirical with them. That starts with Harrelson’s two-scene appearance as the drunken captain who all of the passengers want to meet; his sardonic performance is in sync with the film’s semi-indifferent sense of its own power to affect change, but the actor seems to share Östlund’s pleasure in watching the world get turned upside down. Then again, Harrelson also seemed to be having a lot of fun in “Zombieland 2,” so I’m not sure if that’s the best metric for judging his work here.

Elsewhere, we see the ship’s all-white service crew end their daily meeting by chanting “MONEY! MONEY! MONEY!” like a group of apes that have just discovered a Monolith. Östlund doesn’t overly belabor the hierarchical aesthetics of race aboard the ship, but he makes sure to note that the skin tones get darker the deeper his camera descends into the boat/the further away it gets from the guests sunning themselves on the surface — a dynamic that’s completely undone when “Triangle of Sadness” inverts all of its angles for a third act better danced around than discussed head-on.

It’s here, in the film’s shrewdest yet most underwhelming chapter, that Östlund is able to cash in on several of the long, long, long-term investments he made in the first two, as his characters rearrange themselves into a new matrix of transactional relationships in accordance to a radically different economy based on needs instead of luxuries. Some forms of beauty grow more valuable while others become a liability, yet the pecking order and power dynamics of the old world order remain the same even if the individual people have swapped places in that system.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” has a nice ring to it, but the situation here doesn’t resemble a Marxist utopia so much as a funhouse mirror image of how things were before. Looks and class are still inextricable, even for the people who are trying to rip them apart. Everyone may not be equal, but perhaps we’re all the same. It’s a shrug of a conclusion — one that “Triangle of Sadness” reaches with a poorly revealed twist that isn’t worth the torpor it takes to get there. It wouldn’t be worth getting there at all if not for the great Filipino actress Dolly de Leon (“Verdict”), who rises from the bowels of the superyacht, grabs this film by the throat, and chokes it so hard that you can’t help but feel a faint pulse throbbing to life from under all that irony.

If not for de Leon’s bold and heartsick performance, “Triangle of Sadness” would fail to achieve any real measure of the physical discomfort that has animated so much of Östlund’s previous work. A beautifully shot movie so fixated upon the aesthetic value of human bodies can only get by on being really, really, ridiculously good-looking for so long before it needs to cut under the skin. “Talking about money is unsexy,” Yaya concludes in the first 20 minutes. If only Östlund didn’t have so much more to say about it. And so little.

“Triangle of Sadness” premiered in Competition at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. 

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Triangle of Sadness (Sweden/France/UK, 2022)

Swedish director Ruben Ostlund is at it again, using the medium of film to satirize themes and ideas worthy of ridicule. In 2017’s The Square , he turned his attention to the art world. In Triangle of Sadness , the canvas is broader and includes the fashion industry, the superficiality and venality of the wealthy, and the shallowness of political dogma. As was the case with The Square , Triangle of Sadness takes some time to get going and occasionally slips into pretentiousness, but on this occasion Ostlund’s screenplay is better focused.

Triangle of Sadness is divided into three very different chapters. The first, “Carl and Yaya,” introduces the two main characters, model and Instagram influencer Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and her less successful model boyfriend Carl (Harris Dickinson). We get to know these two by accompanying them on a date to a trendy, upscale restaurant where the question of who’s paying turns into a point of contention. Money is an issue for Carl (he doesn’t have much of it) and Yaya seems to enjoy using this as a means of manipulation.

…Chapter 3, “The Island.” A bizarre amalgamation of “Gilligan’s Island” and “Lost,” the concluding episode of Triangle of Sadness takes place after a disaster befalls the ship. The survivors find themselves stranded on a remote island with few supplies and fewer survival skills. Of them all, only the lowly below-decks worker Abigail (Dolly De Leon) has a clue how to fish and thus provide for the small group of uber-wealthy. And, in this new environment where food trumps money, the social order is reversed.

Although there’s probably never a minute that goes by without some kind of barb being tossed, Ostlund reserves his sharpest daggers for illustrating how utterly out-of-touch the ultra-rich are. One client rants about how the sails are dirty (when the ship doesn’t have sails). Another demands that all the workers use a slide to take a dip in the ocean. These people don’t take “no” for an answer. When the tables are turned and they find themselves helpless and effectively impoverished, their innate uselessness is italicized.

The Captain’s Dinner reminded me of the Mr. Creosote sketch from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life as courses are vomited all over the desk and throughout the halls. To add to the mess, a toilet overflows, creating flows of sewage. Clearly, although Ostlund has some serious ideas to present, he’s not above using a gross-out, least-common-denominator means to an end. As was true of The Square (and to a lesser extent, Force Majeure ), the longer, central act is stronger than the bookend chapters.

Repetitiveness is a double-edged sword. Although it allows Ostlund to amplify his themes, it also results in a movie that seems about 20 minutes too long for the material. Editing is increasingly a lost art and there are times when Triangle of Sadness might have been more effective had it been presented with greater economy. Stylistically, however, that’s Ostlund. We’ve seen it before and doubtlessly we’ll see it again. There’s enough here to make it worth enduring the length.

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• Darkest Minds, The (2018)
• Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)
• King's Man, The (2021)
• (There are no more better movies of Charlbi Dean)
• (There are no more worst movies of Charlbi Dean)
• (There are no more better movies of Vicki Berlin)
• (There are no more worst movies of Vicki Berlin)

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Triangle of Sadness’ on Hulu, Ruben Ostlund’s Skewering of the Moneyed Elite

Where to stream:.

• Triangle Of Sadness

Triangle of Sadness (now available Hulu, as well ass on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video ) is the second Palme d’Or winner for Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, the first being 2017’s The Square (his 2014 effort, Force Majeure , ONLY took home the Cannes Jury Prize). Boasting up-and-coming stars Harris Dickinson ( The King’s Man and Where the Crawdads Sing ) and Charlbi Dean (of TV’s Black Lightning ; she died suddenly earlier this year) alongside sturdy veteran Woody Harrelson, Ostlund’s latest is a satirical black comedy potshotting the filthy rich, and takes great pleasure in seeing them suffer – especially during a grossout vomitfest that’s one of the year’s you’ve-gotta-see-THIS sequences.

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

That was Act I. Act II finds the couple aboard a yacht populated with bloated richie-riches, an overeager staff trained to never say no, and heavily armed security guards. A helicopter whup-whups into the area and drops a yellow case into the sea, quickly retrieved by the crew and quickly whisked down to the kitchen – when a billionaire on an ultra-luxury cruise wants Nutella, this is how they get it. Carl and Yaya sunbathe on the deck and argue when she’s friendly with a shirtless crew member and Carl complains about the guy to management and a bit later Carl sees the guy being fired and escorted off the ship and Carl feels bad about it. Meanwhile, flies buzz prominently in the foreground of shots and the sound mix because of the prominent moral rot and decay among the passengers – or maybe it’s a flies-drawn-to-feces metaphor. It works either way, I guess.

As Carl takes a photo of Yaya pretending to eat pasta for a social media post, we meet some of the other character types on board. There’s Dimitry (Zlatko Buric), a Russian slob who earned his fortune in fertilizer, and introduces himself by saying, “I sell shit.” Paula (Vicki Berlin) is the staff supervisor, always with a smile pasted on. The Captain (Harrelson) gets blotto-drunk inside his cabin and never ventures out. An elderly couple tells Carl and Yaya how they made a killing manufacturing hand grenades, but their business hit a rough patch when the U.N. started regulating landmines. The ship lists and sways violently in a storm during the Captain’s dinner, while passengers try to stomach oysters, escargot and what appears to be a pile of extra-gelatinous hand sanitizer, but is probably something nasty that a crustacean excreted. It doesn’t end well. That scene, I mean. More happens in Act III, where representatives of the class struggle aboard the ship end up in a dire scenario, leaving many of them despairing and likely wondering if they’ll ever have an opportunity to belittle a wine steward or undertip a concierge of color ever again.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Triangle of Sadness often feels like Michael Haneke’s Gilligan’s Island meets Yorgos Lanthomos’ Titanic . Fans of Bravo’s Below Deck franchise (and its many spin-offs) will also find the circumstances familiar, if supremely elevated.

Performance Worth Watching: Harrelson – who doesn’t go as over-the-top as we might expect, somewhat disappointingly – and Buric are equally amusing and ridiculous during a scene in which they drunkenly debate the tenets of socialism and capitalism.

Memorable Dialogue: “I’m not a worthy socialist. I’m a shit ssshhhhhocialishhhht .” – The Captain

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond a scene in which Carl and Yaya engage in a little foreplay roleplay.

Our Take: Bodily fluids erupt and Ostlund doesn’t discriminate – the offal blurts forth pretty much equally from both ends of the digestive tract. And just when you think the filmmaker has rendered shit and vomit the great leveler, he shows us how the servant class ends up diligently scrubbing the floor in the wake of the wealthy’s gastrointestinal rebellion. Ah well, then. Perhaps this mighty, unforgettably vile sequence is a simple exercise in schadenfreude, as amusing as it is sickening.

Consider yourself warned, then. Triangle of Sadness takes big, sneering swipes at the moneyed class, so anyone with a wicked (and understandable!) lust to see billionaires suffer beneath Ostlund’s satirical sledge has a lot to snigger at. The screenplay’s odd, unconventional structure – the first act is a compelling study in male/female power dynamics, the second indulges familiar upstairs/downstairs class-struggle strata and the third devises a Lord of the Flies scenario – suggests there’s a greater idea at play, although what it may be remains either obfuscated or never thoroughly developed. The film is essentially Ostlund playing with proletariat/bourgeois stereotypes, lightly lampooning influencers and the fashion industry, breezing by feminism and the folly of societal facades, and iterating some obvious assertions about humanity’s failure to find the utopian mean between sharing what you earn and earning what you share. He at least takes the eat-the-rich concept a step further than usual, showing us what the rich eat when it goes in and then comes right back out.

Our Call: The rich are an easy target, but ever a worthy one, and Triangle of Sadness stirs enough eff-the-ruling-class righteousness to warrant a watch. STREAM IT, but this recommendation hinges on the strength of your stomach.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com .

• dark comedy
• Stream It Or Skip It

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One Love: What the Bob Marley Movie Gets Right (And What it Gets Wrong)

Bob Marley: One Love provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of the iconic singer. However, not everything depicted in the film was accurate.

Biographical films about iconic people are notoriously tricky to do right. By nature, they deal with larger-than-life individuals with stories and significant moments so expansive that capturing their essence within the confines of a single film can be difficult. The bigger the name, the larger the weight of expectation from everyone whose lives were touched by them, and every fan or follower they ever had.

When the film, Bob Marley: One Love was released, it was the legendary artist's musical contributions and enormous influence on the world and his millions of fans worldwide which transcended different generations that provided the expectations.

Bob Marley: One Love

While it's done reasonably well so far commercially , and featured a great performance by its star, Kingsley Ben-Adir , the film left a lot to be desired in a critical sense — mustering an unexpectedly paltry 43% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. With such a colossal life and legacy as its subject, it was perhaps always doomed to be overshadowed by the enormity of Bob Marley himself, and struggled to fully capture his gravitas as a person and artist.

The film has also recently been the subject of much fact-checking, causing many people to wonder just how many of the scenes it depicted were based on facts. If you're one of them, here's a look at the significant things Bob Marley: One Love got factually correct, and which prominent facts about the singer were either incorrect, left out, or changed for dramatic purposes.

Read Our Review

Most of His Life and Legacy Were Accurately Depicted

One of Bob Marley's most endearing qualities to fans was that he lived his life in a manner based on his spiritual underpinnings as a Rastafarian. Aside from being known for his practice of smoking marijuana (which Rastafarians believe brings one closer to the divine through the meditative states it induces), Marley was known as a kind and gentle soul who only wished for peace and a sense of unity and togetherness among all people.

His propensity for peace actually informed the plot of the film, as it centered on the One Love Peace Concert that he devised to help heal divisions responsible for a huge spate of violence in Jamaica at the time.

All of these angles are adequately catered for in the film, with Marley's childhood influences (or lack thereof) also briefly covered. Significant among those he lacked was the fact that his father was only briefly seen in flashbacks in the film, and seemed to be absent from his life. This was true, since his father, Norval Marley, was a white construction engineer who met his mother while overseeing a project. Norval left shortly after Marley was born, seeing him only a few times after that, ultimately passing away before his son turned 10.

Related: Kingsley Ben-Adir Talks Bob Marley: One Love's Success & Basketball Ken at the Oscars

His Arrest Was Real But His Marijuana Use Was Downplayed

While Bob Marley's arrest and detention during his famous stay in London in the late '70s, was depicted, other aspects of his life were downplayed. As the film depicted, the incident never had a very significant impact on his life. He was, of course, arrested, charged, and convicted for possession of a small quantity of marijuana. However, given that his marijuana usage played a major part in his life, with him even campaigning for its legalization, the film seemed to downplay his relationship with it.

While these aspects of the film were negligibly handled either way, the scene where Marley speaks with gang enforcer Claudie Massop after an attempt on his life, was likely fabricated for the film . The surrounding factors were true. Marley was indeed a target of the gangs plaguing the region at the time for what was deemed his support of one group's views over the others. However, his meeting with Massop in the film was probably made up, since Massop would likely have been in a detention center around the time depicted in the scene.

The assassination attempt itself was true, and the fact that it almost resulted in Marley and his wife, Rita's death, did have a profound emotional effect on Marley. It's also true that no one was killed in the incident, though there were injuries to Marley and the others as depicted in the scene. It was also true that he and Rita still made it to the concert, and he performed magnificently in it.

His Love Life and Affairs Were Downplayed

Bob Marley: One Love did depict the fact that both he and wife Rita had affairs . However, while the film showcased this significantly through a jealousy outburst, it downplayed the fact that their marriage was actually more of an open one. In reality, Marley was notorious for his love affairs, fathering children with at least six other women. However, his most famous side quest was with 1976's Miss World, Cindy Breakspeare — who is the mother of Marley's son Damian.

Aside from all the headlines and the enormous stir their relationship caused , the film also downplayed just how significant a love triangle it caused between the pair and Rita. Given Marley's far more amorous reputation, and the fact that the film was produced by, among others, Rita Marley herself, and their children, Ziggy and Cedella Marley, it's understandable why her own affairs weren't spotlighted as much. It also likely explained why she was depicted as his true love, while in reality, he was said to have been just as close to Cindy Breakspeare too.

Related: The Best Musical Biopics, Ranked

His Death and Musical Legacy Were Mismatched

As a biographical film that really centered on a snapshot of the life of Bob Marley, the film also dealt with his death. However, it inaccurately portrayed that he never sought adequate treatment once he learned he was ill. In reality , after learning of his Melanoma, Marley did have surgery and thought he would be okay. Sadly, his cancer spread rapidly, leading to his untimely death four years later.

What wasn't shown by the film was that he did still seek to try and treat his cancer after it had spread, even looking into experimental treatments in Europe. While his battle was ultimately futile, Marley did try to do everything he could to save himself. As sad as his death was, what the film did get right was capturing the timeless and immortal soul of his legacy.

Through the emotive way it handled the concert, and many little moments wonderfully performed by Kingsley Ben-Adir , Bob Marley: One Love does do a good enough job of conveying just how loved, talented, and immense he was as a singer, activist, and an all-round icon.

It's the words of the great man himself that often best convey how he lived his life and why he remains so revered to this day. Among his many famous quotes , this one perfectly captured why people loved him best.

Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together black, white, Chinese, everyone that’s all.

Check out the trailer for Bob Marley: One Love below.

Global Screen Reveals Further International Sales of Spy Thriller ‘Davos 1917’ at MipTV (EXCLUSIVE)

By Leo Barraclough

Leo Barraclough

International Features Editor

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Leading European distributor Global Screen , part of Telepool, has secured further international sales of high-end drama “ Davos 1917 ” at MipTV . New acquisitions of the six-part thriller include SBS Australia, TVP in Poland and Big Tree Entertainment in India and the subcontinent.

“Davos 1917,” which launched at the end of last year on SRF in Switzerland and ARD in Germany, has already been bought by a strong lineup of premium international broadcasters and streamers across North America, Europe and Asia.

The show is set in 1917 as World War I is ravaging Europe. By contrast, Switzerland seems like an oasis of peace. But behind the scenes of neutral Switzerland, the secret agents of the world powers are lurking in Davos. Here, a young woman searches for self-determination and does everything she can to win back her daughter, who was taken away from her at birth.

“Davos 1917” is produced in German and Swiss-German with English subtitles, and dubbed in French and Italian.

The show is directed by Jan-Eric Mack, Anca Miruna Lăzărescu and Christian Theede. The creator and headwriter is Adrian Illien. The co-writer is Thomas Hess, Julia Penner and Michael Sauter. The DOPs are Tobias Dengler and Timon Schäppi.

It is produced by Contrast Film (Ivan Madeo, Stefan Eichenberger, Urs Frey), Letterbox Filmproduktion (Lisa Arndt, Andreas Knoblauch), Amalia Film, SRF and ARD Degeto. The executive producer is Marco Mehlitz.

Brianne Bonney, Global Screen’s head of TV sales, said: “Set against the unparalleled scenery of the Alps, ‘Davos 1917’ reveals the exciting and sensational story of secret and complex espionage activity taking place during World War I in Europe. We are delighted to see this epic thriller travel to such strong broadcasters around the world on so many continents.”

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‘Housekeeping for Beginners’ Review: Daddy Nearest

Sad news forces a diverse group of friends to take unorthodox action in this volatile, affecting drama.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

For his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” the writer and director Goran Stolevski returns to his birthplace, North Macedonia, to capture the tumbling energy and volatile emotions of a household in crisis.

The home, a haven of sorts for racial and cultural outsiders, belongs to Dita (Anamaria Marinca), a middle-age social worker whose partner, Suada (Alina Serban), has received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. While Dita anxiously seeks treatment options, the more abrasive Suada accuses her doctor of ill-treating patients who, like her, belong to the maligned ethnic group known as Roma. Suada fears for the future of her daughters: Vanesa (Mia Mustafa), an astringent teenager, and little Mia (a ridiculously charming Dzada Selim). Desperate to give them a better life, she begs Dita to adopt the girls and fraudulently register them as white. And as lesbians are not permitted to adopt, Dita will have to marry a man.

This setup might sound depressing or even farcical, but “Housekeeping” is deeply sincere and occasionally joyous. As Dita and a gay housemate, Toni (Vladimir Tintor), reluctantly plan a Potemkin wedding, Naum Doksevski’s supple, hand-held camera swerves and dodges around raucous dance parties and rowdy arguments, visually mapping the residents’ tangled fates and churning feelings. A furiously grieving Vanesa rebels by seeking out her Roma grandmother. And playful Ali (a terrific screen debut by Samson Selim), Toni’s latest hookup, entertains Mia and mediates quarrels. Intimate, partly improvised conversations affirm the group’s rough affections and peppery personalities.

This stylistic pliancy is a far cry from Stolevski’s beautifully controlled feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone” (2022) , yet both share an interest in difference and the restrictions of approved gender roles. In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.

Housekeeping for Beginners Rated R for bad language and good vibes. In Macedonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.

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‘Burn This’ fails to catch fire

Over the past couple of decades, the plays of Lanford Wilson have been conspicuous by their absence from Boston-area theaters.

Hub Theatre Company of Boston is currently seeking to redress that state of affairs by staging Wilson’s “Burn This.” Kudos to the company’s tireless founder and producing artistic director, Lauren Elias, for doing so.

If only the play were better.

As it is, “Burn This” registers as a mechanically assembled contraption that travels in increasingly repetitive circles, defeating the best efforts of director Daniel Bourque and two of the most interesting actors around, Kiki Samko and Victor L. Shopov.

Samko plays Anna, a dancer-choreographer who has been sharing a Manhattan apartment with two gay roommates: Larry (Steve Auger), an advertising executive, and Robbie, her close friend and collaborator, who has just been killed in a freak boating accident.

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Anna is deep in mourning, almost broken. Larry, too, is devastated. They go into great detail as they describe Robbie’s funeral to Burton (Tim Hoover), Anna’s screenwriter boyfriend. And then Anna goes into similarly extensive detail about the post-funeral gathering with Robbie’s family.

Now, it’s seldom a good idea, dramaturgically speaking, to spend large chunks of time at the start of a play — when the audience is just getting to know you — for a protagonist to go on and on about characters whom the people in the seats cannot see and will never see.

It usually — not always, but usually — tends to limit our investment and inhibits a play’s chance to build the kind of forward momentum that can carry the audience along with it. At “Burn This,” tedium sets in, and you can feel the air coming out of the production.

The play shifts into a higher gear, temporarily, when Robbie’s brother, a restaurant manager named Pale (Shopov), shows up. Pale doesn’t so much walk into the apartment as erupt into it, all alpha edges and furious energy, talking a mile a minute, and generally seeming to have wandered in from a David Mamet play. (Indeed, Pale’s entrance is markedly similar to the way Teach bursts into the pawn shop in “American Buffalo.”)

Beneath his volatility and bluster, Pale is wrestling with his own sadness and unresolved issues with his late brother (at least partly, it appears, stemming from his inability to accept Robbie’s homosexuality).

For Anna and Pale, grief and lust eventually commingle, and we’ve got ourselves a love triangle. The working-out of that triangle — Burton, an egocentric chap, is not pleased by the turn of events — forms the substance of much of what remains of “Burn This.”

But too often the conflicts between Anna and Pale feel like contrived plot devices, a way to keep the pyrotechnics going while Wilson figures out what his play should truly be about. The result is a certain shapelessness and a spinning of narrative wheels.

This is not primarily a case of a play failing to withstand the test of time. The shortcomings of “Burn This” were evident way back in 1987, when it premiered on Broadway with John Malkovich and the great Joan Allen as Pale and Anna. A Broadway revival five years ago starred Adam Driver and Keri Russell.

Wilson, who died at 73 in 2011, was a theater figure to reckon with for decades, beginning in the mid-1960s. Boldface names and on-the-rise performers alike were drawn to his work. Regional theaters vied for the chance to add a Wilson play to their seasons.

Long before Richard Nelson’s Apple Family cycle, Wilson wrote a trilogy about the fictional Talley family, consisting of “Talley’s Folly,” “Fifth of July,” and “Talley & Son.”

“Talley’s Folly,” a romantic comedy that starred Judd Hirsch and Trish Hawkins as an outwardly mismatched couple making their fumbling way to love in 1940s Missouri, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. During that same year, “Fifth of July” was presented on Broadway, with Christopher Reeve in the lead role as a gay paraplegic veteran of the Vietnam War, and a cast that also featured Jeff Daniels and Swoosie Kurtz. “Fifth of July” ran for more than 500 performances.

Wilson’s 1973 off-Broadway hit “Hot L Baltimore” inspired an ABC comedy in 1975, with none other than Norman Lear as an executive producer. It ran only half a season, though, a rare flop for Lear in a decade when he often had the Midas touch when it came to sitcoms.

For long stretches of his career, Wilson possessed a Midas touch of his own, when it came to theater. But not with “Burn This.”

Play by Lanford Wilson. Directed by Daniel Bourque. Presented by Hub Theatre Company of Boston. At Plaza Black Box Theatre, Boston Center for the Arts. Through April 21. All shows are pay-what-you-can. hubtheatreboston.org

Don Aucoin can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him @GlobeAucoin .