Cruising for a bruising: “Triangle of Sadness” (2022)
There are times when satire is too on point, too on the nose, and threatens to overwhelm other aspects of a story. “Don’t Look Up” came close to that, but skirted it by couching the satire in farce and going very, very broad. Conversely, Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” is assured, spot on, and with a script that imbues its characters with nuance and even warmth. It remains an unsparing indictment of class, racism, privilege, disconnect, and the reduction to living on the surface that comes with the ascendancy of “influencer culture” and social media in the larger sense. It begins with what seems as a broadside fired at the fashion industry and reaches peak snark when judges at an audition remark that Carl (an excellent Harris Dickinson) should consider Botox (at twenty-five years old in real life and I assume the same for his character, that is, of course, laughable) and one of the judges asks that he relax his “triangle of sadness” the furrow between the eyebrows. The first c...