Alfred Jarry meets Voltaire meets Lost meets Buñuel should work, shouldn’t it? It’s certainly a great pitch for a certain class of elite film financier. Östlund more or less delivers on target in a rangy, showy movie that is intermittently entertaining and intermittently overdrawn. Östlund’s greatest skill, it seems to this critic, is his capacity to forensically analyse and destroy the nuances of modern mores. So the elaborate conversation between the film’s eventual protagonists, Yaya and Carl, about who pays the bill, which serves as a kind of entree to the meal we are about to consume, is gloriously minimal and spiky and skewers contemporary discourse about gender politics, among other things. I could have watched a whole movie of this kind of dialogue and acting, but the film aspires to a wider remit, and soon moves towards broad neo-Carry On comedy. Arms manufacturers blown up by their own weapons in a homage to Churchill, projectile vomiting and a lurid battle of the quotes, which includes Reagan, Marx, Lenin and Edward Abbey (¿?). Somewhere down the line, all nuance is thrown out of the window, before we get to the Hobbes/ Buñuel finale. There’s no shortage of ideas in Triangle, in fact it feels as though there is probably a surplus and some redistribution might have been in order. But each to their own, and in its own cultish way, it is doubtless destined to become one of those films of which future generations will say, as they might now about Ubu - have you ever triangled your sadness?
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