Triangle of Sadness: The Captain’s Dinner Is Coming Up

Will anything ever make this kind of laughter stick in rich people’s throats? Does their merriment come with any cost they will ever notice? Plenty of streaming content addresses these questions, engaging with the cruelties of the widening wealth gap and the audience’s need to see it undermined and fractured. Recent movies like Glass Onion and series like The White Lotus, however, mock the wealthy while also indulging viewers’ desire to participate in the splendor of high-end travel and luxury living. These fantasy projections create mixed emotions of resentment and enjoyment. They are not destructive. And after a round of Twitter commentary, they fade from memory.

Östlund has a special knack for cutting through this thorny problem. He writes and directs movies that complicate things, making them pricklier and more troublesome, impossible to forget. In his films, the bad-faith arguments of his well-off characters, their irresponsibility, their selfishness, and their wrong decisions are shocking because they are so automatic, so reflexive. In Force Majeure, The Square (2017), and now Triangle of Sadness (2022), what Östlund calls a “trilogy of masculinity,” he has taken elements from generic entertainment—the family vacation, the workplace comedy, lovers on a desert island—and treated them sociologically, with a clear logic, in presentations that discomfort by leaving nothing out, and then holding on a little too long.

His cold eye is what separates his work from that of other filmmakers, something the Cannes Film Festival has noticed. Force Majeure won a Jury Prize there. Three years later, The Square won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top award, and in 2022 Triangle of Sadness took the Palme again. Though it is not unprecedented for a director to win the Palme d’Or twice, there is something jolting about this provocateur’s success at the most prestigious and fanciest of all film festivals. By singling out Östlund this way, it’s like the jet set is trying to tell us something about itself.

Starting as it does with scenes from the fashion industry, Triangle of Sadness comes haute out of the gate, but it’s aiming lower. In its three acts, the movie mimics familiar reality-television structures, getting beneath its subjects right away, like a mechanic sliding under a Rolls.

Part I, “Carl & Yaya,” traffics in the same fashion-biz world as America’s Next Top Model. Part 2, “The Yacht,” is like the various Below Deck series, which contrast the life of a superyacht crew with that of the passengers they serve. Part 3, “The Island,” replicates the stalwart Survivor concept, in which people severed from their usual lives are trapped on an island and denied the resources of their class affiliations, so we can see them in a state of nature, and watch them fall or rise.

That trope goes back to 1719, when the first readers of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe assumed it was the true story of a shipwrecked man who befriends a native on a desert island, then makes him his slave. First, tragedy. Then—after colonialism and the robber barons and their conquest of the natural world during the Industrial Revolution—comedy. J. M. Barrie’s 1902 play The Admirable Crichton provided the reverse template for stories of servants becoming masters when trapped in raw nature with their supposed betters. By the mid-1960s, the sitcom Gilligan’s Island had banalized the various strains in these tales, with its crew and millionaire passengers stuck “on the shore of this uncharted desert isle,” laugh track added.

In our era of climate crisis and obscene wealth, movies featuring cruise ships, troubled yachting excursions, and travelers stranded on the beach are newly relevant, and have popped up with some frequency. Jean-Luc Godard set the first part of his Film socialisme (2010) aboard the doomed Costa Concordia cruise ship, which ran aground two years after that film’s exposé of global capitalism. Its wreckage is visible in Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty (2013); two years later, it was scrapped. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Annette (2021), by Leos Carax, each trapped their wealthy characters on a superyacht in stormy seas, while M. Night Shyamalan’s Old (2021) stranded resort guests on a beach.

Östlund acknowledges the familiarity of this setting. When the model Carl (Harris Dickinson) begins spending nights in the beached lifeboat with the former “toilet manager” Abigail (Dolly De Leon), the other men stranded on the island tease him by tracing the phrase “LOVE BOAT” on the side of the small vessel. Using a TV reference, they are mocking the privilege that Carl has garnered with the currency of his beauty—a reversal of his position with Yaya (Charlbi Dean) at the beginning of the film.

Yaya had claimed that her only future was as a trophy wife, and looked horrified in a taxi when Carl said he thought they should be equal partners in their relationship. After some nighttime working-class role-play in their cabin on the yacht, by the last act of the film Carl achieves this equality, but not in the way he expected. He becomes a trophy himself.

At the fashion show early in the film, a sign flashes on the runway: “EVERYONE’S EQUAL NOW.” Later, the wife (Sunnyi Melles) of a Russian oligarch exhorts the yacht’s crew to join her in the pool. “We are all equal . . . Everyone’s equal,” she tells them. “I want all the staff to go for a swim . . . Let’s reverse roles.”

Triangle of Sadness plays the idea of equality in this unequal situation as an obvious joke. Östlund understands that, in an oligarchic society, the game is fixed. Equality is only a gesture performed by these tourists, who go on vacation to indulge themselves, including in their guilt, which becomes another luxury for them.

The scale of sickness, confusion, and mayhem that Östlund rains down upon the superrich in Triangle of Sadness, a comedic anti-Titanic set in our present, is something you would have to have a gut of steel not to be moved by. If the film’s class outrage doesn’t stir something within you, on some level, somewhere in your soul, maybe you are too refined for movies.

Because, yes, it is the merciless puking in the Captain’s Dinner scene that distinguishes Östlund’s ship of fools from other cinematic sea voyages, even the other anticapitalist ones. Godard’s harsh-looking HD video in Film socialisme may be a form of digital retching, but Östlund gets literal.

“If I’m going to do this, I have to go ten steps further than the audience expects,” Östlund said in an interview with Deadline. The audience should be nervous, wondering, “Where is this going to take me?” He had to create on-screen the “authentic feeling of when the body is surprising you.” Knowing he could not flood the actual yacht’s corridors and stairways with vomitus and the overflow from lavatories, he and his crew stepped off the Christina O to shoot most of that scene over thirteen days in a re-creation of the yacht’s dining area, using a gimbal on his camera to keep it steady so the set could rock twenty degrees.

Other Östlund films have hinted at how, when it really matters in today’s society, no one is in charge. There’s the driverless car going in circles in a parking lot, smashing into barriers, in his first feature, The Guitar Mongoloid (2004). In Östlund’s second film, Involuntary (2008), a bus driver who refuses to drive nonetheless cites airline pilots as his inferiors because most of their work is automated. In Force Majeure, another bus driver can’t quite make a turn on a mountain pass but keeps trying, endangering his passengers. When we meet the main character in The Square, museum director Christian (Claes Bang), he is asleep in his office when he should be preparing for an interview, which he then flubs.

In Triangle of Sadness, a type of canny casting new to Östlund’s work is in play. Putting Woody Harrelson in the role of the ship’s captain was a coup that finally brought this theme of the willful abdication of responsibility into the open, allowing Östlund to go further with it than he had before. Harrelson’s Thomas Smith, an American Marxist and alcoholic, prefers drinking in his quarters to running the ship from the bridge. Faced with total destruction, his version of “Nearer My God to Thee” is drunkenly trading pointed anticapitalist quotations with an equally soused, Reagan-loving Russian oligarch. In their duel, they both get on the ship’s intercom to berate the imperiled passengers about not paying their fair share in taxes, and then to lecture them about the lie of philanthropy.

The paunchy oligarch, Dimitry, is played by Zlatko Burić, whom fans of European crime films will recognize as the dope dealer Milo from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Danish Pusher films—particularly Pusher III (2004), in which he stars as a mobster and murderer who gives his staff food poisoning with his cooking while he remains unaffected, just as Dimitry doesn’t get sick in Triangle of Sadness. “Shit” is slang for drugs, and in Östlund’s movie Burić is a man who has become wealthy selling agricultural fertilizer. “I sell shit,” Dimitry keeps telling the other passengers.

Arvin Kananian plays the first mate, Darius, who refuses to say no to the situation at the pool that keeps the ship’s kitchen staff from their duties and precipitates the disaster. In the dour Swedish science-fiction hit Aniara (2018), Kananian plays the lying commander of the massive spaceship that goes off course as it is headed to an exoplanet to save humanity. Even in devising some of the smallest parts, Östlund makes a point. The cabdriver who tells Carl to stand up to Yaya is Jiannis Moustos, the glowering hotel janitor from Force Majeure who looks down on that film’s arguing couple whenever they go into the hall to discuss things away from their children. Vacations are rough. The staff can see you.

Regardless of Harrelson’s unpredictable, enduring star power, Burić’s wild-haired presence, or the nuanced, incisive performances of Harris Dickinson and Dolly De Leon, Triangle of Sadness will be best remembered for Charlbi Dean’s costarring role as the manipulative fashion model Yaya. A unique beauty, Dean died tragically of sepsis at age thirty-two, after Triangle of Sadness won at Cannes but before it came out in theaters.

Playing a character who could be seen as self-centered and testy, Dean instead brought wit and charm to this central role. The film ends with Yaya unable to picture Abigail as anything but an employee. (“Maybe you can come and work for me. You could be my assistant.”) On the verge of rescue, she’s poised to get her head crushed in with a rock, but her sense of entitlement will remain intact. Like Yaya, in this movie nothing lets up.