A major Cannes award-winner and Oscar nominee, Triangle of Sadness has been heralded by film critics as a witty, commercially viable art-house criticism of 1) the obscenely wealthy, and 2) of different power hierarchies in society (class, gender, race). Intended as a satirical black comedy, this film therefore falls in line with a body of other recent work, including The Menu, Glass Onion and the HBO series The White Lotus, attempting the same. Unlike the aforementioned works, however, Triangle of Sadness is a shallow vehicle for the director's centrist ideological arguments and relies almost solely on outdated stereotypes and straw men -- something particularly observable in the train-wreck that is the final chapter of the film.
The film is divided into three chapters. In the first part, we are introduced to a young gen Z couple and their questionable, gendered power dynamics as they navigate a career in the fashion industry. In the second chapter, we are introduced to a cruiseship's plethora of wealthy elites and their absurd antics as seen from the point of view of the petite bourgeois couple from the first chapter. Finally, in the final chapter, a major incident throws the surviving cast of passengers into a Lord of the Flies-esque survivalist scenario, intended to highlight and deconstruct power-dynamics and comment on 'human nature'.
The first chapter starts off reasonably well, taking a brief dive into the fashion industry (depicted as co-opting progressive themes such as the climate crisis as an example of its profit-driven, performative hypocrisy). More importantly, it establishes the groundwork for our two major protagonists: a female character, Yaya (Charlbi Dean), seemingly wealthy and well connected in the fashion industry, and a male character, Carl (Harris Dickinson), who acts insecure in his relationship with Yaya, and appears conflicted by his status as exploited, objectified model. As tension arises in their relationship due to a mismatch between this unequal power balance and Yaya's gendered expectations of the Carl's role as financial provider, the director seems to hint at a problem of gendered inequality in the fashion industry and a supposed favoritism towards women. Unfortunately, the strength of this argument is soon inexplicably lessened as it is revealed that Yaya is, indeed, neither a fashion designer nor a famous model, but, instead, works as an Instagram 'influencer' relying on freebies promoted on social media. While real-life examples of established influencers are indeed capable of raking in thousands of dollars a month through affiliate programs, it would have made more sense for the director to position Yaya within the very industry he tries to criticize, rather than create unnecessary distance. Is there a reason for this? Perhaps she is using him to further cement her position in this industry? We shall never know, this aspect is never further explored.
Rather than nitpicking on what initially appears to be a seemingly minor fault, however, I see this as an early indicator of the film's core flaw: framing this character as a social media influencer is namely soon revealed to be for the purpose of a single slapstick gag in which we see Carl obediently taking various pictures of his girlfriend posing for her social media followers (including various angles of Yaya holding a plate of pasta). Indeed, having been invited to a cruise for the ultra-elite (why a cruise service aimed at billionaires needs to advertise itself through Gen Z social media influencers lies beyond me), in the second chapter we truly come to understand that every single passenger on this boat, rather than being (exaggerated) portrayals of real, existing (classes of) people and thus representing actual ideas, is instead conceived of for the purpose of a single gag and serves no further purpose.
What is supposed to be a representation of a Silicon Valley 'tech bro' is instead a balding, unfashionable and overweight man; he tries (and fails) to pick up girls at a bar and offers them expensive gifts ("I am very rich"), and in a clueless manner, talks to an uncaring, drunk captain about making his wealth through selling code (consequently highlighting the director's complete lack of understanding the current state of the IT industry).
A disabled woman, stated to have lost the her capability to speak due to a stroke, is depicted as completely lucid and capable of moving her hands and arms. When attempting to speak, however, she can only say one German phrase, "in der wolken". The intention here is to increase the silliness of whatever slapstick comedy that is going on by having her repeat this phrase in the background. It is an ableist joke and quickly overplays its welcome.
A seemingly sweet, older British couple, when asked how they made their wealth, proudly present their history in weapon manufacturing. A benign stand-alone gag relying on the punchline that this couple profits from military conflict. The woman tries to repeat the disabled person's single phrase, but fails to great hilarity. In misogynist fashion, her husband has to correct her (bizarre, given that they are supposedly from old money dealing in weaponry in Europe -- you would think that having some knowledge of Germanic languages would be the standard). Later in the film, the woman picks up a grenade thrown in front of them by a pirate, and again, in a clueless manner, asks her husband "isn't this one of ours?" before they both get blown up.
A black man working in the ship's engine room is introduced solely for a gag that involves him being suspected to be a pirate due to his skin color, and serves zero further purpose in the story.
An older, pro-capitalist Russian man that has made his fortune through monopolizing fertilizer -- hilarity ensues whenever he shouts that he "sells s**t" -- in the post-Cold War era, and an alcoholic, pro-socialist American captain (Woody Harrelson). These characters were written solely for an overplayed gag of them googling and exchanging Marxist or pro-capitalist one-liners over drinks while the majority of the passengers ends up vomiting (or literally rolling around in their own feces) due to a major storm -- a form of cringe, even scatological, humor that is drawn out entirely too long. Criticism of the film's supposed left-leaning agenda misses the director's positioning of the captain as being too engrossed in his theoretical works to realize that the ship he is supposed to command is both on the verge of sinking and is under attack by pirates. In other words, the one explicitly left-leaning character in this film is a drunkard and an ivory tower 'intellectual' incapable of understanding or responding to his immediate surroundings.
Having established the main cast, these characters are thrown into a survivalist scenario in the third chapter. Whereas the other characters retain their slapstick personality and behave accordingly, one surviving character, a South-East Asian toilet lady, is introduced as a mechanism to invert the supposed power dynamics depicted in the first two chapters. Despite her age and exploited position as invisible labor on the ship, off-board she quickly takes command through her survival skills such as fishing, cooking and lighting fires. Although she in effect becomes an authoritarian leader (enjoying her newfound power by, for example, soliciting sexual favors from Carl in exchange for pretzels), this is somehow presented as a form of matriarchy. This portrayal is on one hand entirely reliant on orientalist tropes of the exotic Other's survival skills, and on the other hand lazily falls into the category of the "power always corrupts" genre, disregarding any genuine analysis of what happens when working-class members actually obtain power and wealth. To add insult, upon discovering that they were on a resort island all along, the 'matriarch' contemplates killing Yaya, the other character accompanying her on a walk (at this point, the inconsistency of not a single person on the island hearing reports of a nearby ship exploding, or noticing the firing of flares introduced earlier for another lazy gag, is hardly relevant anymore).
My main dislike of this film lies in its faulty base arguments: Criticism of societal concepts and power dynamics in fiction is only possible if those fictional characters resemble what we know and understand to be either real people or genuine human behavior. None of that is here; instead the director relies on lazy stereotypes and slapstick humor, while simultaneously retreading forms of criticism that we have seen time and again over the history of film; nothing presented in this film was in any way novel.
Finally, just like this review, from an editing perspective, the film is entirely too long and fails to retain the viewer's attention. This is completely unrelated to its supposed status as an art-house film, but can solely be blamed on bad editing. Although it wouldn't have solved the core issues of the film, at a minimum cutting out 30 minutes of overplayed gags could have helped lessen the painful watching experience.