This is a Ruben Ostlund film and it's a satire and it does not let you forget either of those things as it goes from setpiece to setpiece driven by a very few ideas and repeats them until you are well past the point where you have got it. Then you just have to live through the screen time, mentally checking your watch as it just goes on. Without spoilers I will say that the third part (there's no real act structure) actually lifts the game and plays like a well constructed black comedy and all but leaves the puerility of the approach behind.
Ostlund began his feature film career with Play, a frustration story of teenagers being bullied into a kind of abduction nightmare. It was heavily influenced by Michael Hanneke's audience-abusing bleakness, owing particularly to that director's Funny Games. Despite that, it did work and presented a serious pass at social commentary with a punch. Since then Ostlund discovered satire and stayed within it, liking it so much that his films' running times have just kept stretching. In the cast of Triangle of Sadness you feel the stretch without the benefit of the exercise.
Here's a cause of that: Ostlund puts something intentionally annoying into the background which frustrates the audience, the characters or both. He likes doing that so much that it becomes as predictable a feature as an unearned jumpscare in a James Wan film. As Carl and Yaya are arguing in the taxi there is a loud scrubbing noise from the windscreen wipers. Later at the hotel when the argument resumes, it's Carl preventing the lift door from closing. Toward the end it's a bashing sound from an undisclosed source that keeps interrupting a couple having sex. There are more and the thought is inevitable that if he'd kept it to just one of those instances it would be recalled as astute, a keen observation of the way the things of real life can interrupt us at our most serious. But he didn't restrain himself and just keeps using it. It goes from an effective use of elements to a tiresome replayed joke.
The Captain's dinner scene is an elongated debasement in which the elite passengers are overcome with nausea from stormy weather and diarrhoea from the food (spoiled by a clunking joke about a passenger's whim). All the rich people in their finery vomit into gtheir dinnerplates or on each other or simultaneously vomit and splat out their running faeces into overflowing toilets and so on and so on and so on and so on .... Hey, I guess that for all the heights they've scaled above the common folk they really are still people. If you've seen the Mr Creosote sketch in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life you already seen this done in far more punchy fashion where it really did look like dark absurdism rather than a child swearing to get shocked reactions out of grownups.
And then we get the final phase which plays out like a move that you'd care about. And earlier on there's a scene where the cruise manager leads a pep session for the serving crew which turns into a genuinely funny chant and dance number. The opening scene is a models' cattle call as a room filled with beautiful young men is organised before their going into individual auditions and then being put through exercises. Until the childish end of that scene where they're instructed to smile and frown in rapid alternation (which would only be funny if it related to anything from real experience) it is an impressively well managed crowd scene. Ostlund really can make movies when he wants.
There are some directors who grow out of their youthful impulses or develop them into genuinely useful tools of cinema. Ostlund reminds me of film makers like Wes Anderson who seems to have taken the indulgence granted him by fans to keep churning out the same tropes that scream, "see? it's me!" I don't give Ostlund a break the way I do to Ken Russell who went way over the top in the '70s with his proofs that classical composers were just like modern rockstars or that gutter comedy could mix with sophistication. Russell always had a point beyond the shock and managed to finish it and present it as value for his audiences. Ostlund by comparison feels around the same chord sequence, looking for a strong pattern or rhythm only to abandon it before doing the same with the next. And now and then he'll play something inspired and masterful. Triangle of Sadness is so heavily weighed toward the formless noodling that it's as if he keeps everything in while his films run hours longer than they should for what always feels like a slight reward. After that you just feel like finding a favourite song and blasting it into your ears until you forget the one you've just been played.
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