2 out of 5

Directed by: Christopher Smith

When you’re crafting an especially twisty story – one with conflicting narratives, maybe some timey-wimey nonsense – there comes a point of no return: when the story can essentially only end in one, pretty unsatisfying way. You’ve twisted yourself out of being able to tell something complete, and have made the tale solely about the twists. You can generally tell when this occurs in such stories; if they “work,” it’s because you’ve successfully distracted your audience up to that point.

Christopher Smith’s Triangle is not successful in that regard. The initial lead-in achieves it, but some tension is spoiled via budget limitations – Smith gave himself a setting that required too much greenscreen, and despite shooting around it pretty well, it’s still omnipresent – but we end up hitting the aforementioned point well before Triangle is partway through its runtime. The movie manages to eke out some more value by just kind of grinding the wheel as far past “no return” as possible, to the extent where we might start questioning if things are going to turn out differently, but no, it’s all part of the same cycle.

Melissa George plays Jess, a harried single mum caring for her autistic child, and allowing herself a day of leisure aboard her friend Greg’s (Michael Dorman) boat, Triangle, accompanied by a mixed gaggle of Greg’s friends: a posh couple, their would-be date for Greg, and Greg’s housemate. We’re already set off canter by a swirlingly cut lead-in, prior to Jess’ onboarding, which doesn’t not establish what I’ve mentioned, but does so with scattered edits, sometimes conflicting, already putting us somewhat off guard; since our next sequences are stitched together via Jess waking up from a dream, and her dialogue to this point is muddled – did she drop her kid off at school today, maybe; she apologizes for no clear reason – we’re rather well unnerved for what a sudden onset storm may bring.

The boat is capsized; the gaggle regathers and is able to be picked up by an ocean liner, the Aeolus, the Greek origin of its name getting a helpful addition later on. Once aboard, the boat seems abandoned… save for a darting figure only Jess seems to see, just out of view. Soon, creepy messages are being discovered, directing the survivors away from, or maybe towards, danger; soon that darting figure proves to be a menace…

While, again, Smith has been pretty crafty in shooting around it, the green screen behind the initial boat sequence, and any top-side bits on the Aeolus are quite painful. It’s possible to bundle it under a general dreamlike vibe, but the movie needs to shift to tension, not surreality, and this hinders that. The same rule applies to the tension: the aforementioned point-of-no-return hits pretty much as soon as the film needs to move from being indirectly creepy to more direct: because Jess is our POV, and we’ve mostly established that her narrative is untrustworthy, it leads down a few predictable plot paths. The script is quick to try to wriggle out from beneath that, but it does so in a way where it reveals something… and then plays like it hasn’t revealed it, later on, as Smith tries to unbury his story from the corner into which it’s being packed. Some valiant attempts to do so only make the cyclical nature of the movie ultimately more frustrating.

George is an exciting lead, but the script does require her to play into a kind of forceful naivety; the remaining actors are there to mostly be fodder for the twists, but they commit themselves to their parts. Greenscreening and further budget limitations aside, Smith and DP Robert Humphreys get some really effective angles and setups; it’s nice that the interior set was built – the movie is most effective running through its corridors – but it’s a shame the team couldn’t find a way to almost wholly limit it to that.