Pure scorn without wit or insight: Triangle of Sadness reviewed

The latest film from Ruben Ostlund received an eight-minute standing ovation after its screening in Cannes and also won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and this has left me entirely baffled: what, the film I’ve just seen? The one where every scene is far too long? The one billed as a ‘satirical black comedy’ even though the targets are easy and it doesn’t say anything and I didn’t laugh once? That film? I should add, it’s not for the emetophobic. One of the scenes that goes on far too long involved so much vomiting that I could only watch the bottom 5 per cent of the screen. Ostlund needs someone like my mother in his life to tell him it’s not clever, it’s not funny, pack it in.

Ostlund has, it’s true, previously made two magnificent films: the earth-shattering Force Majeure about an avalanche in the French Alps and The Square, an art-world satire that also won the Palme d’Or, whatever that’s worth. This is also about awful rich, privileged people but unlike Parasite, say, or the TV series The White Lotus, it is pure scorn and, trust me, 149 minutes of pure scorn without wit or insight properly drags.

It’s told in three distinct acts with the first being the best. It introduces us to a male model, Carl (Harris Dickinson), who has the ‘triangle of sadness’. That is the patch of skin between the eyebrows and top of the nose that becomes more furrowed with age and may require Botox, so I did learn something. Next, he’s out for dinner with his girlfriend, Yaya (Charlbi Dean), a flinty model, where a row ensues over a restaurant bill. He always picks it up even though she’s richer than him. She eventually offers a credit card that’s declined.

I was eating this up. What’s the story here? Why does she never offer to pay? Where’s her money gone? But this never plays out. Whatever is happening between them is never mentioned again. I had hoped this would delve into the power of beauty as a currency, but no such luck. It’s the sort of film that has as much contempt for its audience as it does for its characters.

The second act takes place during a holiday aboard a luxury yacht, a freebie for Yaya who is a top ‘influencer’. She’s endlessly taking photos for Instagram and holding forkfuls of exquisite handmade pasta to her mouth which she then doesn’t eat. That’s one of the ‘jokes’ but it’s low-hanging fruit, surely. The other guests include a Russian oligarch, a lonely tech billionaire, a German woman who has had a stroke and can only say the same thing over and over and a British couple who manufacture armaments and are upset that a ban on certain landmines has reduced their profits. They’re called Winston and Clementine, which is also a joke.

They’re all feebly sketched and ghastly. Woody Harrelson briefly appears as the drunken captain who won’t leave his cabin but is then gone again, although not before engaging with the oligarch in an extremely protracted, undergraduate-level argument about Marxism vs capitalism. The weather turns appalling, hence the copious vomiting. And then the yacht goes down and a few survivors are marooned on an island. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that, as it’s all in the trailer, which also goes on for far, far too long.

On the island, money no longer speaks, so Abigail (Dolly De Leon), who was the ‘toilet manager’ on the boat now insists she’s in charge, as she can make a fire and catch fish and has actual skills. This could have been so interesting, but isn’t. The film says nothing about inequality, wealth or greed, as far as I could gather. Needless to say, I did not give it a standing ovation.