“Bad dreams make you think you’re seeing things that you haven’t.”
Why isn’t Melissa George a bigger star? One might blame the glut of horror movies in the mid-00s; perhaps George got lost among your Odette Yustmans or Shauna Macdonalds, talented actresses who had the misfortune of getting their break in an over-saturated market. Nowadays, horror is either glossy A24 productions like The Witch or Blumhouse entries like Happy Death Day, so movies like Triangle, which don’t fit into those classifications, are destined for the wayside.
Triangle can be hard to get into, which you’ll see is by design. Jess (Melissa George) is comforting her son, Tommy, after he has a bad dream. Then she’s cleaning up, promising him that the floors are all right and not sticky anymore. Then they’re in the car, and then a significantly more vacant Jess is meeting friends at the marina for a sailing trip. The first little bit of this movie can be tough, because at first it seems like Jess is just a cipher of a character (I likened her to any time Frodo gets all spacey in The Two Towers). Jess’s reasoning for getting on the titular ship is a bit of narrative contrivance, though; the man who invited her, Greg, isn’t someone she’s involved with romantically, but a regular at the diner she works at.
All of Greg’s friends and pretty nondescript and unpleasant. Greg himself is a nice enough guy, and seems to care for what I guess is his ward (a baby-faced Liam Hemsworth). But then there’s Sally, who mainly exists to talk trash about and to Jess, and about mental illness in general; there’s Heather, brought aboard ostensibly as a romantic interest for Greg, only to tell him flat out she’s not interested; and Downey, which is not a first name even though Triangle wants us to believe it is. Anyway, after hearing a garbled distress call, the ship gets capsized and wrecked in a storm, in what is honestly a pretty tense sequence.
Stranded atop an upside-down yacht, the group has no choice but to seek refuge on a passing cruise ship, the Aeolus. This is where you’d expect a haunted ship movie, and it’s an understandable assumption. The Aeolus is all old-school art deco and parquet floors, seemingly unchanged since the 1930s. (The movie even gets in the old tried-and-true bit about a sumptuous-looking banquet turning to rotten food.) For a while, that’s how Triangle operates, until a development that, on its surface, is pretty lame.
By which I mean, someone is a sackcloth mask and a jumpsuit starts picking them off with a shotgun. By the thirty-minute mark, everyone but Jess is dead, and her tussle with the killer ends anticlimactically, with the killer falling overboard. At this point there’s an hour left in the movie, which made me wonder, well, what happens now. Then the group returns to the ship.
Yes, Triangle is a time-loop movie, and a pretty successful one at that. If you’re looking for something terrifying, you can justifiably skip this one. It’s not bad, but it’s one of those situations where what’s happening doesn’t scare us, but would terrify us if it were to happen to us. Triangle hits all the expected beats: Jess scrupulously avoids contact with her other-self, strange sights and noises are explained, she tries to explain what’s happening, only to be met with ridicule and disbelief. Where Triangle differentiates itself is by having Jess get used to the situation quickly, and start thinking of a way to get out.
I don’t want to get too much into spoiler territory, so forgive me in advance if I do. Hell, just go watch the movie, but get in on disc or on demand. I watched in on IMDb TV (through Prime), where it was free with commercials, which is maybe the worst way to view a movie at home. Anyway, Triangle has a lot of fun with its timelines, and you never quite knows just how many versions of Jess are on the ship at the same time (at one point, Jess spies the earlier version of her fighting the killer, who, yes, is also her).
There are some terrific visuals, some of which made me gasp, that illustrate just how long Jess has been stuck in this loop. At one point, her locket falls into a grate, and when she looks down she sees a small pile of lockets. Later, a wounded Sally flees Jess and winds up dying on a deck filled with identical Sally corpses. Jess is extremely accurate with a shotgun because she’s had a lot of time to practice.
At times – especially near the end – Triangle is pretty bleak, which can understandably alienate people (in that way it’s akin to the Black Mirror episode “White Bear”). But I don’t think it’s about undue punishment. I think it’s about grief, and guilt, and the inability to fix our past selves or our past lives. Something that’s set cannot be fixed, and the events of our past inexorably lead to the same destinations. Like the lines of a triangle.
Thursday, 10/1: Phantasm
Friday, 10/2: Frozen
Saturday, 10/3: Suspiria
Sunday, 10/4: Suspiria (2018)
Monday, 10/5: Emelie
Tuesday, 10/6: Castle Freak
Wednesday, 10/7: Session 9
Thursday, 10/8: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Friday, 10/9: We Are Still Here
Saturday, 10/10: The Changeling
Sunday, 10/11: The Bad Seed
Monday, 10/12: Verotika
Tuesday, 10/13: The Legend of Hell House
Wednesday, 10/14: Lake Mungo
Thursday, 10/15: Puppetmaster
Friday, 10/16: Marrowbone
Saturday, 10/17: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Sunday, 10/18: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Monday, 10/19: Sweetheart
Tuesday, 10/20: Girl On the Third Floor
Wednesday, 10/21: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Thursday, 10/22: Triangle
Friday, 10/23: Dog Soldiers
Saturday, 10/24: Noroi: The Curse
Sunday, 10/25: Train to Busan
Monday, 10/26: Tales From the Hood
Tuesday, 10/27: Mandy
Wednesday, 10/28: Sometimes They Come Back
Thursday, 10/29: Veronica
Friday, 10/30: The Wicker Man
Saturday, 10/31: Child’s Play
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