Review: Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness on Criterion 4K UHD Blu-ray

After Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, writer-director Ruben Östlund ended his acceptance speech by leading the festival audience in a primal scream, just as he’d done a few years earlier when taking the top prize for The Square. The spectacle of Östlund, the ostensibly ruthless parodist of bourgeois mores, entreating this well-fed, black-tie crowd to vocalize some deep-seated rage as if he were a latter-day Howard Beale encapsulates both the pleasures and limitations of Östlund’s particular brand of caustic pasquinade.

All of which is to say that Triangle of Sadness appeals to precisely the same people it professes to deride. Episodic, fabulistic, and self-consciously outrageous, the film introduces us to one comically despicable capitalist after another—including oblivious aristocrats, insipid social media influencers, and self-justifying weapons manufacturers—before subjecting them to humiliation, mostly at the hands of the nonwhite proletariat they barely even deign to notice. There’s something satisfying in this structure, which has the moralistic logic of a slasher film, but it’s ultimately self-negating, confusing scabrous cynicism for trenchant insight.

Divided into three parts, the film opens in the willfully superficial world of high fashion, at an audition of male models where Carl (Harris Dickinson) finds that he’s not quite young enough in the eyes to the casting directors, who suggest that he get Botox to rid himself of his “triangle of sadness” (the wrinkles that form in between one’s eyebrows). Östlund gets in some well-deserved digs at the vapidity of the fashion world, as in a runway show in which models prance in front of a screen emblazoned with the self-aware aphorism “CYNICISM MASQUERADING AS OPTIMISM.” But he’s primarily interested in this section in the kind of intimate dissection of relationship dynamics and gender roles he previously explored in Force Majeure.

Östlund provides a lengthy, multi-part exegesis of a single moment, when Yaya (Charlbi Dean, whose performance is now haunted by her recent death), Carl’s successful influencer girlfriend, pointedly avoids picking up the check after their dinner in a fancy restaurant. As the two bicker through the night, Carl’s self-pitying masculine insecurities rise to the surface while Yaya’s blasé manipulativeness becomes clearer and clearer. The content of the lengthy sequence isn’t especially revelatory—it could’ve easily served as the basis for a Seinfeld episode 25 years ago—but Östlund nevertheless demonstrates his uncanny knack for capturing the subtly devastating absurdities of human behavior with a cool, unflinching eye. His long takes are beautifully attuned to Dickinson and Dean’s precise, unsentimental performances, which capture the uglier aspects of modern relationships without resorting to histrionics or mugging.

But rather than drill down further into the dark core of Carl and Yaya’s relationship, Östlund expands his focus outward in the film’s second section, in which the young couple takes a cruise on a $250-million luxury yacht populated by a compendium of Daumier-esque bourgeois caricatures. Many of these are performed with entertaining panache, such as Zlatko Burić’s bug-eyed turn as Dimitry, a coarse Russian fertilizer mogul, but Triangle of Sadness is categorically resistant to shading in any of its characters beyond a few broad strokes.

Instead, Östlund simply places them in increasingly absurd scenarios, peaking with a disastrous dinner hosted by the yacht’s harried captain, Thomas Smith (Woody Harrelson), during a heavy storm. As fine-dining delicacies are served up, the boat sways violently back and forth, resulting in fountains of vomit spouting from the guests’ mouths and cascades of diarrhea flying from their posteriors, all climaxing in rivers of raw sewage streaming through the bowels of the boat.

It’s an amusingly over-the-top sequence, but Östlund’s provocation feels contrived. As the shit flows, Dimitry, the arch-capitalist, and Captain Smith, an avowed Marxist who relaxes in his cabin to “The Internationale,” drunkenly debate the merits of their preferred systems, mostly by trading quippy quotes back and forth. The shallowness of their conversation may be a comment on the degraded nature of contemporary political discourse, but, in practice, it just further blunts whatever satirical impact this sequence might otherwise have achieved. Östlund’s contempt for the monied elite is palpable but so is his inability to move beyond mockery to any kind of substantive critique, much less to advance a vision for a better society.

It’s certainly not the duty of a filmmaker to promote a political agenda, but the problem for Triangle of Sadness is that Östlund’s pessimism ultimately leads the film toward a self-negating dead end in its allegory-heavy final act. After the ship is attacked by an unidentified group of pirates or terrorists, a small group of passengers and crew are stranded on a desert island. Here, the only person with any practical skills, a maid named Abigail (Dolly de Leon), uses her superior survival abilities to rule the island as her own personal fiefdom, claiming the one bit of shelter for herself and using her position to extract sexual favors from her chosen darlings.

Because we know nothing about Abigail—she’s glimpsed only briefly prior to the third act—the film invites us to read her only generically as a stand-in for the workers of the world pressed beneath the boot of capital. The implication is that, at heart, the lowly working woman is no less ruthless or selfish than her oppressors; the exploited would, if given the chance, exploit right back, and 10 times as hard. While there may be some truth in this notion, Östlund’s broad-brush depiction of a literal dictatorship of the proletariat here ultimately serves to reinforce the very status quo that the rest of the film so viciously satirizes. Yes, war profiteers and tax-evading billionaires may be bad, Triangle of Sadness seems to say, but look how dangerous the other guys are. If the well-heeled crowd at Cannes ever felt implicated by the film’s sardonic ridicule of the upper class, any and all guilt has been assuaged by the time the credits roll.

Image/Sound

In terms of depth and detail, the 4K presentation of Triangle of Sadness is stunning. Color reproduction is consistently remarkable, and the skin tones are perfectly balanced. The film’s darker footage, namely the scenes set at night on the island, skews a bit dark, but that’s by design, and no fluctuations in quality are noticeable. The audio is available in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and the presentation is sharp. There’s a gently dynamic intensity to the ambient sounds that pop up in the soundtrack. Most importantly, the dialogue exchanges are consistently clear, and if they’re somewhat mixed low during the scenes set inside the ship, that’s an accurate representation of natural sound reflections within confined environments.

Extras

In a conversation with actor Johan Jonason, writer-director Ruben Östlund discusses, among other things, the contrasts that he wanted to draw across Triangle of Sadness and the presumptions about class that he wanted to push against. In the short behind-the-scenes program “Erik, the Extra,” we get a front-row seat to Östlund setting up his longtime producer Erik Hemmendorff to be doused by a river of shit on the set of the film. A neatly edited second program focus on the special effects, big and small, that went into 83% of the film’s images, such as the addition of debris to water and the removal of extras from certain scenes. Rounding out the package is a series of deleted scenes sans commentary, a trailer, and an essay by critic A.S. Hamrah that abounds in extra-textual reflection, on everything from Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme to Buster Keaton’s The Navigator to Gilligan’s Island.

Overall

Triangle of Sadness asks us to eat the rich, but the Criterion Collection’s release, sans a commentary track by Ruben Östlund, is at best a delicious light snack.