Fear comes in waves (tagline)

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Christopher Smith, known for writing and directing arterial spray-infused thrillers such as "Creep" (2004) and "Severance" (2006), moves into more psychologically murky waters with the ship-set "Triangle" (2010). It is difficult to discuss this film without going into spoilers, so here's the basic plot and my essential thoughts on the film.


"Triangle" opens with single mom Jess (Melissa George) in a hurry to get somewhere, having seemingly been delayed by her autistic son. After dropping him off at school, Jess joins potential lover Greg (Michael Dorman) on his yacht along with some of his friends and a young man he's taken under his wing, Victor (Liam Hemsworth). It's not long before the trouble begins: the wind drops, and then a storm capsizes the yacht. Happy to board a ship that passes their way, they believe they're saved, except for Jess who is clearly unsettled by the fact that there's no-one else on the ship. It's not long before people start dying. 


"Triangle" is clever but not as much as it would like to be. It is seldom tense or scary, but the film looks great and Smith makes good use of contrasting the blue and white openness of the sea with the dark, confined interiors of the ship. Although one can figure out what's going on without too much difficulty, the film is at least somewhat unpredictable in how it reveals the dynamics aboard the ship. The problem is that post-"Sixth Sense", many people, including myself, go into a thriller already anticipating a big twist of some sort, and spend the movie trying to figure out what's going on, looking to see how the puppet master pulls the strings. Few thrillers prove wholly satisfying, and in the end we have movies like "Triangle" that can be classified as almost not shooting itself in the foot. It doesn't help that even before the action is really afoot, the film over explains its thinking with too many overt mythological references. 


Now, to go into some soft spoiler territory.


Those mythological references I speak about above? They mostly concern Sisyphus, that unfortunate fellow who was damned to push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got near the top. What is a man to do? Start over. Repeat for infinity. This provides the film's narrative macro structure, which finds Jess in a position where she has to perform certain actions to get to an apparent end, only to fail and start over again. Structuring the film like this is a blessing and a curse: it makes for a different type of thriller that's more cerebral than most thrillers but the novelty wears off eventually. The film's plot does not hold up under scrutiny.


Still, as flawed as it is, "Triangle" is much better than most gore-obsessed horrors that come out these days, and it gives new meaning to genre term Final Girl - traditionally used to indicate the lone female survivor in a typical horror movie - by emphasizing how alone this lone figure truly is.