Triangle

Saw Triangle, a clever film. It's so clever as to be kind of convoluted. I feel like everything in the film is so enslaved to the clever central idea that the characters are not so much people as merely variables in some elegant equation. The equation is very pretty, and very cute, but it leaves me feeling kind of removed and analytical. I don't want to give away the central conceit but the film telegraphs pretty hard that this is gonna be a head-trip. The central protagonist woman starts the film comforting her autistic son, telling him to pretend he's somewhere else, like she does when she's upset. She goes on to say that she imagines herself here with him, just like this, dropping a pretty heavy hint right there.

The woman then goes to a party on a friend's yacht. The party hits bad weather and wrecks, but the surviving party-ers find refuge on a seemingly-abandoned cruise ship. On the ship, mirrors abound, time screws up, they talk about Sisyphus and his father Aeolus (whom the ship is named after. This is where the title of the film partly comes from. Aeolus is the triple god of the wind.) Later on, there's a three-paneled dressing-room mirror that the protagonist is reflected in. The room number of the cabin is the same as her house number (edit: this is a reference to The Shining apparently. There are a huge number of The Shining references, so that's fairly apt.) The hints are thick as flies and mostly sort of self-consciously signify "oh watch out! Tricky tricks are a-comin'!"

The film is like something I would be really proud of writing: very clever but also very proud of its own cleverness and not quite as subtle or sly or mind-blowing as it thinks it is. Lacking in character or empathy but thinking that an abundance of foreshadowing and film-101 symbolism will make up for it. For the most part it's fine and I want to emphasize that it's really not bad. I'm just harping on how it's not great. And at this point, if you want, I'll spoil the film for you here: The woman is trapped in a time-loop of some kind, repeating the same actions over and over. When the film ends, she has gone back to her son, but must inevitably set sail and be shipwrecked once more. Note the reference to Sisyphus.

There's a couple of clever scenes, such as (spoiler:) when Susan crawls onto a heap of already-dead Susans to die. which I dug and enjoyed. There's also a few bewildering references which are maybe red-herrings, such as (spoiler:) the repeated hints that this is all imaginary. At one point a character literally says "this is all in your head." I wish the characters were a bit more fleshed out and that the film was less interested in making sure the equation came out just right, but as it is, the film is indeed clever and fairly fun. A film to watch if you like puzzles, but easy puzzles.