Triangle of Sadness

Triangle of Sadness is a 2022 satirical black comedy film written and directed by Ruben Östlund in his English-language feature debut. The film stars an ensemble cast led by Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean (in her final film role), Dolly de Leon, Zlatko Burić, Iris Berben, Vicki Berlin, Henrik Dorsin, Jean-Christophe Folly [fr], Amanda Walker, Oliver Ford Davies, Sunnyi Melles, and Woody Harrelson. It follows a celebrity couple on a luxury cruise with wealthy guests who end up stranded on an island and fighting for survival.
The film had its world premiere at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2022, where it received an eight-minute standing ovation and was awarded the Palme d'Or. It grossed over $32.8 million worldwide and received positive reviews from critics, who mostly praised Östlund's direction and screenplay, as well as the performances of the cast (particularly de Leon). At the 95th Academy Awards, the film earned three nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. It was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Supporting Actress (for de Leon) at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, and for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (for de Leon), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Casting at the 76th British Academy Film Awards. Among other accolades, it won Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenwriter, and Best Actor (for Burić) at the 35th European Film Awards.
Carl, a model, attends an uncomfortable casting call with other male models. Carl is dating Yaya, a model and influencer, and resents her for expecting him to pay for meals even though she earns more than he does. They bicker about money and gender roles. Yaya admits that she is in a relationship with Carl for the engagement it earns them on social media, and that she seeks to become a trophy wife, but Carl declares that she will come to love him.
Carl and Yaya are invited on a luxury cruise aboard a superyacht in exchange for its social media promotion. Among the wealthy guests are the Russian oligarch Dimitry and his wife Vera; the elderly couple Clementine and Winston, who have made their fortune manufacturing grenades and other weapons; Therese, a wheelchair user only capable of speaking a single phrase in German following a stroke; and Jarmo, a lonely tech millionaire who flirts with Yaya. The guests luxuriate on the yacht, oblivious to the crew working to meet their every need and whim. The head of staff, Paula, demands they obey the guests' absurd requests, including having every crew member swim in the sea. The kitchen crew is ordered to swim as well, despite the chef warning that the food will go bad. Carl complains to Paula about a crew member whom Yaya finds attractive, inadvertently getting the man fired. Meanwhile, the yacht's captain, Thomas Smith, spends his time drunk in his cabin.
Against Paula's advice, Thomas schedules the captain's dinner during a storm. Several guests become violently seasick, vomit or have diarrhoea, possibly due to the food, and panic breaks out. The drunken Thomas and Dimitry debate in favour of communism and capitalism, respectively, over the intercom. Several guests are injured as the storm tosses the ship, the sewage floods, and the power goes out. When morning arrives, pirates attack, killing Clementine and Winston with a grenade and sinking the yacht.
A small group of survivors consisting of Carl, Yaya, Dimitry, Therese, Paula, Jarmo, ship's mechanic Nelson (whom Dimitry accuses of being a pirate), and cleaning woman Abigail manage to escape to an island. At first, Paula continues to order Abigail to serve the cruise guests. When it becomes clear that Abigail is the only one with survival skills, such as catching fish and starting a fire, she mutinies and usurps command by withholding food. She gains her own private bed inside a lifeboat and coerces Carl into a sexual relationship by giving him food in exchange for sexual favours. Jarmo kills a wild donkey for food by smashing it with a rock, which Dimitry, Nelson and the others celebrate. Yaya grows jealous of Abigail because Carl considers leaving Yaya for Abigail.
When Yaya hikes to the other side of the island, Abigail volunteers to go with her despite Carl's concerns. They discover a lift built into the rocks and realise they have been stranded near a luxury resort. Back at the camp, Therese encounters a beach vendor but is unable to communicate her situation. Yaya celebrates finding the lift, but Abigail hesitates to enter, fearing she is losing her power. She then prepares to attack Yaya with a rock, but hesitates when the oblivious Yaya offers to help her. When Yaya clarifies the extent of the help would be hiring her as an assistant, the camera cuts away. Elsewhere, Carl frantically runs through the jungle.
Triangle of Sadness was announced by director Ruben Östlund in June 2017, after his film The Square won the Palme d'Or at the 70th Cannes Film Festival the previous month. He said the film was to be called Triangle of Sadness, a "wild" satire set against the world of fashion and the uber-rich, with "appearance as capital" and "beauty as currency" as the underlying themes. The English title refers to a term used by plastic surgeons for the worry wrinkle that forms between the eyebrows, which can be removed with botox.
Research for some parts of the script took place in May 2018. Casting took place from August to November 2018 in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Gothenburg, and continued in Moscow in March 2019. Location scouting began in January 2019 and lasted intermittently until October 2019. Östlund fine-tuned the last details of pre-production from November 2019 to the first half of February 2020.
In February 2020, it was reported that Triangle of Sadness would begin principal photography on 19 February in Sweden and Greece, with a 70-day shoot, and that the cast would include Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean and Woody Harrelson. About 120 actors were considered for the role that Dickinson landed, and Emily Ratajkowski was among the actresses who auditioned for Dean's role. On 26 March, production paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic with about 37% of shooting completed. Editing started during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Production resumed on 27 June in Sweden, allowing Harrelson to finish his scenes, but was halted again on 3 July.
Production resumed on 18 September on location at Chiliadou Beach, Euboea, Greece, for the last 38 days. Filming wrapped on 13 November 2020, concluding a 73-day shoot. Östlund reported that the production carried out 1,061 COVID-19 tests throughout filming and all were negative. Filming also took place on other Greek islands, on the stages of Film i Väst in Trollhättan, Sweden, and in the Mediterranean Sea on the Christina O, the yacht formerly owned by Aristotle Onassis. Post-production lasted 22 months. According to the actors, Östlund shot as many as 23 takes for each scene.
Triangle of Sadness premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2022, and won the festival's Palme d'Or on 28 May. It was also an official selection of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, where it held its North American premiere on 8 September, and the 2022 New York Film Festival (1 October).
Neon acquired North American distribution rights for $8 million, winning a bidding war with A24, Searchlight Pictures/Hulu, Focus Features and Sony Pictures Classics. The film was released in France on 28 September, in Sweden on 7 October, in Germany on 13 October and in the United Kingdom on 28 October.
On VOD, it ranked number 2 on iTunes Movies following the Oscar nomination announcements on 24 January 2023. By 9 March 2023, according to Samba TV, it had been streamed on Hulu in 250,000 households in the United States since the announcements, with JustWatch also reporting it to be, by 21 February, the second most-streamed Best Picture nominee in Canada, behind The Fabelmans.
A 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD disc was released by The Criterion Collection on 25 April 2023.
Triangle of Sadness grossed $4.6 million in the United States and Canada, and $28.3 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $32.9 million. It sold over 2 million tickets in Europe.
In the United States, Triangle of Sadness opened in 10 locations in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco to a debut of $210,074, for a per theater average of $21,007. In its second weekend, it grossed $657,051 on 31 screens. In its third weekend, it grossed $600,000 on 280 screens, finishing tenth at the box office. In its fourth weekend, it grossed $548,999 on 610 screens, dropping out of the box office top ten.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 71% of 280 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "Triangle of Sadness lacks the sharp edges of Östlund's earlier work, but this blackly humorous swipe at the obscenely affluent has its own rewards." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 63 out of 100, based on 47 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Alysha Prasad of One Room With A View called it "Utterly unhinged in the best way possible, guaranteed to elicit enough laughter to make your stomach ache, while also leaving you with plenty to think about afterwards." David Kaplan of Kaplan vs. Kaplan praised the ensemble cast as "completely compelling, even if some of the characters are unsavory." Aaron Neuwirth of We Live Entertainment described it as containing "what’s likely the grossest set piece I’ve seen in a movie awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival." Gabi Zeitsman of Channel 24 (South Africa) commented, "if you loved White Lotus and satire aimed at the beautiful and rich, this is a definite must-watch. The fact that it won the Palme d'Or is in itself almost satirical..." "Don't go in expecting art-house intellectualism," wrote Kyle Smith of the Wall Street Journal, "The movie is as loaded with fun as it is with social implications." Paul Byrnes of the Sydney Morning Herald commented, "For Östlund, subtlety is overrated. Triangle of Sadness shows us why he has a point. It’s a spectacular demolition of modern life, a disruptor movie full of ideas and nuance, as violent in its way as a Pieter Bruegel painting." Kevin Maher of The Times detected more nuance in the film, however, stating: "Yes, the metaphor can seem very on-the-nose: the super rich, in this economic climate especially, are obscene and repulsive! But it's a film of great subtlety (really) and benefits from multiple viewings."
Richard Brody, in a critical review for The New Yorker, described Triangle of Sadness as "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." Brody described Östlund's direction as "precise but stiff" and criticised the film's emphasis on social commentary: "[Östlund's] keen observations are submerged in his efforts at social criticism and political philosophy." However, Brody commended the cast performances—particularly Dean's, of which he wrote: "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."
Armond White, in a critical review for National Review, talks about the substitution of concepts in Triangle of Sadness: "Östlund extends his Euro-Marxism into a second-rate allegory about third-world exploitation: An insulting subplot features the ship's Filipino toilet manager (Dolly De Leon) turning the tables on the rich, feckless whites, yet emulating their decadence (Parasite, Part II). Östlund bungles the political, spiritual, and moral lessons of such classics about chaos as Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel, Antonioni's L'Avventura, and Godard's Weekend. White sums up his review calling Östlund "just a misanthrope and a fraud."
Filmmaker Edgar Wright praised the film, saying that it "has plenty to say about the obscene gap in the living wage but is also smart and witty entertainment, brilliantly structured, perfectly performed and masterfully directed to create a purely theatrical experience from start to end."
In 2023, MovieWeb ranked it number 10 on its list of "20 Movies That Require Your Full Attention From Start to Finish," writing "If you are a fan of movies that tell its story through multiple parts or take a drastic turn in direction but also include a wicked sense of humor, then Triangle of Sadness is for you ... This film has such an unpredictable, disgusting, over-the-top hilarious change in direction that if you stop paying attention for even a second, you will probably question if the same movie is still playing."