Triangle of Sadness debuted at Cannes last May and won the Palme d’Or for best film. The chances of it repeating the feat at the Oscars 10 months later seems about as likely as Jeremy Clarkson duetting with Beyoncé. The Academy doesn’t seem to go for films that have 15-minute set pieces in which almost the entire cast projectile vomits, topped off with backed-up toilets exploding in a surge of sewage.
Well, more fool them – because Triangle of Sadness is a film for our times. It follows Carl (Harris Dickinson), a model, and his influencer girlfriend Yaya (played by Charlbi Dean, who tragically died aged 32, just before the film was released), as they take a free luxury cruise, Instagramming as they go. The other holidaymakers are particularly grotesque examples of the super-rich. There’s a sweet, elderly English couple who turn out to be arms dealers; Dimitry, a Russian oligarch who has earned his billions selling fertiliser – or, as he more bluntly puts it, shit (this is quite an excrement-focused film), and a woman who insists that the entire staff of the ship take a swim. Since they have been told that any request from the passengers, however ludicrous, cannot be refused, they comply – which leads to the food for that evening spoiling, and the volcanic puke-fest. Meanwhile, the captain spends most of his time in his cabin getting pissed, until he emerges in order to swap Chomsky and Marx quotes with Dimitry over the ship’s PA system while it is battered by a terrible storm.
