I picked Triangle at random and went in cold. Aside from Liam Hemsworth, none of the actors are familiar to me. Even he’s not all that familiar; I only saw the first Hunger Games. I haven’t seen any of Christopher Smith’s other films. Two people I follow on Letterboxd have seen it, but neither of them mentioned it to me. The title implies a Bermuda Triangle connection, and I’ve seen plenty of those (all of them are bad). I’m always down for a good sea story. Spoilers follow.
Our primary point of view character is Jess, played by Melissa George. She’s a single mother with a young, autistic son. Her daily routine overwhelms her. Her grasp on reality is slipping. This is all conveyed in largely wordless scenes that open the movie. Her son fades into the background as she packs her car. When she arrives at the dock to meet her friends for a sailing adventure, we’re left wondering somewhat uncomfortably where her son is.
Six people assemble for a sailing party: Greg, Victor, Jess, Sally, Heather, and Downey. The group dynamics are set up quickly, with a minimum of fuss. Greg (Michael Dorman) owns and lives on the sailboat. Victor (Liam Hemsworth) is living on the boat right now; Victor ran away from home and Greg took him in. It’s implied, but not stated, that Greg and Victor are in a relationship. Greg met Jess at the diner where she works and invited her along. Sally (Rachael Carpani) and Downey (Henry Nixon) are married and old friends of Greg’s. Heather (Emma Lung) is a friend of Sally’s and Sally’s trying to set her up with Greg, oblivious to Greg’s disinterest.
For those in peril on the sea
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
About fifteen minutes into the movie the sailboat is becalmed and the main plot kicks into gear.[1] A storm brews up out of nowhere and the sailboat is quickly swamped. Heather is lost overboard. The water effects are pretty good, not spectacular, mixing CGI and practical. The action is frenetic, as it should be, but you’re able to follow what’s going on. The movie was made in 2009, and quick-cutting was all the rage then, to the point of unintelligibility. Not so here.
As our five remaining cast members sit on their capsized sailboat, an old-style steamship appears. The ship is named Aeolus, the Greek god of winds (though not the father of Sisyphus, apparently a common mistake). Although illuminated, and under steam, with food set out and the interior in good order, the ship is deserted. The setting is almost a mirror of the middle part of Ghost Ship: in this case, we are aboard a deserted ship that should have people aboard, but doesn’t.
The plot, however, takes a decided left turn. Our characters are stuck in a time loop, or maybe more of a Möbius strip, with two versions of themselves at various times during the action. What’s more, we haven’t entered in the first iteration of that loop. Everything we’ve seen so far happened before and will happen again. This differs from Live. Die. Repeat., which had an explicit on-ramp and an off-ramp. This is a really cool concept and you feel a sense of dread as you realize that there’s no way out.
It’s unclear when or why Jess picked up a gun for the first time. What is clear is that at some point Jess learns that everyone dying resets the time loop, and that each iteration of Jess, but not the other characters, has some memory of her previous times in the loop. She has déjà vu, but not enough knowledge to make a different choice. Assuming that’s even possible–it may be that the on-ramp was all the characters dying in a storm, and she’s in Hell now.
I really liked this. It’s well-made, it’s interesting, it’s efficient, the performances are decent, and it actually surprised me in a few places. Instilling a sense of dread isn’t easy. I suspect that this would really reward a second watch-through.
While watching The Land that Time Forgot, I developed the idea of the “Caprona number”, named after the lost continent where the main action of the movie occurs. It takes 36 minutes for the main characters to arrive there (in a 90 minute movie). The scale is absolute; 36 minutes is a long time to get to the fireworks factory regardless of how long the movie is. By comparison, we meet the brachiosaur on Jurassic Park after 20 minutes, for a Caprona number of 0.56. I’m not taking a principled stand against the slow burn here, but I am in favor of moving things along. ↩︎