Triangle (2009) - 3/4

A day sailing amongst a group of upper-middle class friends and a lower-class mother (Melissa George, from Mulholland Dr.) of an autistic child is suddenly overwhelmed with a mysterious storm. Thankfully an abandoned cruiser is there to pick them up. Or is it abandoned? We follow Melissa George as she puzzles out the temporal rift they find themselves caught in as her friends start dying around her.

It isn't easy to write a time-loop story. It's like the hare in that classic Tortoise and the Hare parable: it starts strong, then it gets lazy. That's almost always the case and it's not that different with Triangle. The typical time-loop story starts by entering into the mystery and the audience is enrapt trying to puzzle it out, trying to put the pieces together before the film can expose it. This is exciting. Of course it can be handled incompetently, but Triangle certainly doesn't have that problem--it's a very skilled picture. So it is very exciting during the first act or two. The typical time-loop story also starts to lose steam at about the middle. This is because, once you've got the gist of what's going on, you can pretty much predict a lot that's going to happen. The feeling of putting the pieces into place with little effort is not quite as enjoyable as the perplexing first and second acts. So is it with Triangle. There's always a chance for a final few moments of intrigue toward the beginning of the fourth act and then it unravels as a good denouement should. So is it with Triangle. As skilled a time-loop story it is, it remains a pretty typical time-loop story, with bits and pieces culled from a lot of recent horror pictures (from Event Horizon to Population 436).

What Triangle does have to offer, however, is a willingness to show the full implications of the time-loop with powerful visuals. I can't think of a single other time-loop film that shows a pile of bodies that are all of the same person. That's pretty clever. So writer-director Christopher Smith (Creep, Severance) is to be applauded for keeping the script coherent and paying off that script with some great visual ideas; these visuals keep the material fresh and engrossing, even when you've already caught its tail.

There are two big mis-steps Smith makes, and the first is spilling out his theme in as pedestrian a manner possible. It's as though he just couldn't trust the audience to make the connection on their own; he had to spoon-feed us. Upon entering the abandoned ship, the Aeolus, the characters comment that Aeolus in Greek mythology is the father of Sisyphus and that Sisyphus is the rock-pushing guy punished for cheating death. So that gives the whole game away right there at the beginning. It's a stupid, stupid move. Even worse is that it makes you have to accept that symbolism is written into the fabric of the universe rather than just the script. But there you go.

Yes, the whole film is sisyphean; in fact, you could better describe it as autistic. What you have is the obsessive repetition of events that overpower with a sense of futility. Everything must remain exactly the same. Even when Melissa George for a moment believes she's doing things differently and getting somewhere, a moment will come when she's overwhelmed with the futility of her situation: she's done this a hundred times before.

The futility is a powerful punch that the audience feels as well. Smith is to be applauded for that at the same time as chastised for it. You see, you kind of wonder, "Why do I need to see this?" and at the end I found myself wondering, "Why didn't you just start the movie here?" I think the idea is that he did start the movie there. But he'd really have to cheat to reach that conclusion. That's the second mis-step.

A final point I want to note is that Melissa George, who basically has to hold the whole film on her shoulders, does an incredible job. She's on screen 95% of the 98 minutes; we experience the whole film through her. It's as much due to her performance as Smith's script that Triangle works. She can go from dazed to manic in a moment and you believe it. Less importantly, I've never seen her looking so lovely. She's a natural beauty. The make-up she has in Mulholland Dr. worked against her. Here we see her shine with very natural, almost invisible make-up.