Triangle

(2009) ***1/2

A group of weekend sailors gets stranded in the Atlantic after a harsh storm. A freighter, the Aeolus, drifts by. It stops to pick them up and then resumes its slow trip across the water. The ship feels deserted, but our characters hear scurrying, and spot the quick darting of someone watching them from the shadows.

The look of the assailant, we eventually see, is mundane. It's someone in blue coveralls with a potato sack for a mask, wielding, even more mundane, a shotgun. But like the maniac that keeps showing up in 1408, the figure in the potato-sack works as a bad-guy despite looking like the PA spent four seconds digging through the prop room.

It works the way other things work in Triangle: as something momentary. The movie is filled with things that feel scary -- freaky images or happenings. But as the story progresses, the context of the story expands, and the scary feel gets lost somewhere in the expansion.

[For a spoiler free review skip to the last paragraph.]


This isn't the first time this exact boatload of people has come to this exact ship. This same sequence of events keeps happening, in just one permutation or maybe a different one every time, stretching back at least dozens of times. There are remnants from these earlier arrivals, lying in piles for our characters to stumble across -- messages scrawled on pieces of paper, lockets, dead birds, etc.. It's like the music video for Come Into My World by Kylie Minogue, in which every new turn adds to the mess from all previous turns.

The big difference is that, here the characters have sway over the events. Knowing that they're caught in a loop, they can affect its outcome. This idea has some juice -- how would they keep winding up in the same spot if the chain of actions could change every time? But it actually comes down to one choice that one character makes -- a moment to decide how to interpret the events on the ship -- and that winds up being the thing that keeps the loop going every time. So we're stuck on the boat for another round, and for all the rounds after that, until she decides she's going to do that moment differently. It's hard not to be annoyed with her for that, and it's hard to like a movie when you're pissed at the characters.


There are two kinds of 3.5 star movies. There are the ones that really are great, fun, and worth watching. Then there are ones that have the basic material to be fours, but lose a half-star for being incomplete or falling short of expectations. That's what Triangle was like for me. It's better than just "good" but I don't plan on seeing it a second time.

Think, fool -- don't just automatically assume you can trust every message scrawled in blood on a mirror.