Triangle of Sadness: 2022’s most intellectually ambitious film, if not its "best"

The Cannes-winning social satire is positively Bunuelian, if broadly Pythonesque, in its evisceration of all economic strata and prevailing superstructures of social media, luxury and fashion. See it.

In another year of generally weak films, as the streaming era continues its dominance and 90% of the planet remains childishly obsessed with infantilizing fantasy and superhero schlock, a few works qualify as must-see––preferably in a theatre––art. Each had different aims, some more ambitious than others.  Equally important if wildly divergent films like The Banshees of Inisheren, Elvis, and Emily the Criminal all made the Crotty cut.  

But, of all my top films, one stood out, not necessarily because it was “the best” film, but because it was so bold and thematically ambitious that, for sheer intellectual chutzpah, it sailed above the rest.  The Cannes-winning social satire Triangle of Sadness is positively Bunuelian, if broadly Pythonesque, in its evisceration of all economic strata and prevailing superstructures of social media, luxury, and fashion.  Though twenty minutes too long, at its brutal stinging Dogme-style finest, aboard a Love Boat from hell, it is in the same class as Bong Jong-ho’s Parasite as one of the sharpest recent takedowns of a world spiritually, intellectually, and morally adrift.  From grotesque Russian kleptocrats to vapid Instagram influencers, to a drunken Marx-spewing Captain, to the vengeful “help,” to their greedy, amped-up, bromide-swallowing managers, no one escapes the penetrating, panoptic gaze of Swedish auteur Ruben Ostlund.

As with his classics Force Majeure and The Square, seemingly incidental gestures of egoism and dishonesty in a core relationship become, upon close examination, stand-ins for larger truths about relationship writ large.  In the fallen world of Triangle of Sadness, if you are breathtakingly beautiful, you accrue outsized get-out-of-jail status.  If you have grifted your way to a monstrous fortune, you will likely escape punishment even if you publicly brag about it.  If you land in steerage, in only a rarefied Survivor-style Reality TV world will you attain transcendence of your Sisyphean lot.

At the dénouement of Ostlund’s meticulously crafted bourgeoise hellscapes, there is invariably a deus ex machina––a walk down the ski mountain or an elevator back to the party––with often a restoration of traditional power dynamics.  You may have owned the vacuous supermodel on that seemingly deserted island, eminently practical Filipina toilet cleaning lady, but now that the cold hard Upstairs Downstairs truth of the world has reasserted itself, you are back to where you started, with zero leverage over your status except a vomit of crude violence.  It’s a cynical view of predatory capitalism, but, in the nuanced hands of Ostlund, it rings true without being preachy or leaden.  

Triangle of Sadness rightly does not equip viewers with an easy remedy for the palpable vulgarity it shoves in our faces, but it does alert us to be wary of earnestly swallowing today’s robotic pablum about race, justice, and Socialism.  In its sly way, it reminds us that no one is minding the global ship of state because no one grasps what that would take, especially when money, fame, and essential survival skills one should have learned at summer camp cannot save us, and when the putative “captain” is robbed of his dignity, and manhood itself of its pivotal place in the cosmos.  Into the void of the earnest, dumb, and ahistorical invariably appears a darker more totalitarian strain. 

Many viewers of Triangle of Sadness complain about the disturbing captain’s dinner scene.  But its excessive nature is precisely the point, cutting through the easy happy resolution that Hollywood would prefer.  Triangle of Sadness offers a unique counterpoint to today’s vomitus of Woke cine-schlock, delivering an apocalyptic warning to a mercenary, narcissistic, virtue-signaling world gone horribly out to sea.