In Review: 'Triangle of Sadness,' 'Hellraiser,' 'Smile'

Ruben Östlund's Palme D'Or-winner hits a fat target dead center and two new horror films follow trends from different eras.

Triangle of Sadness
Dir. Ruben Östlund
149 min.

The worst thing that could be said about Ruben Östlund’s class satire Triangle of Sadness is that sending up the grotesque privilege and uselessness of the ultra-wealthy is like shooting fish in a barrel. But damn do those fish have it coming. Winning his second straight Palme D’or after another satire, The Square, ridiculed the pretensions of the art world, Östlund expands the frame to a raucous dissection of society at large, taking aim at the capitalist and patriarchal structures that keeps our ship of fools afloat. His intent is rarely unclear, to put it mildly, but Triangle of Sadness feels like an essential movie of the moment, daring to confront the most basic tensions between the haves and have-nots at a time when chaos threatens to disrupt the world order. Even the world’s most luxurious yacht can’t avoid choppy waters. 

Told in three distinct chapters, each its own flavor of meltdown, Triangle of Sadness starts with Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbli Dean), two models and Instagram influencers who exist in the tenuous place of representing wealth without quite securing it for themselves. In their first scene together, they engage in a passive-aggressive squabble over the bill to one of those restaurants so expensive that attaching actual prices to menu items seems too gauche. hen the bill shows up and Yaya doesn’t move to pay it, as Carl insists she promised she’d do, an argument over it spoils their evening. Neither one of them can admit the truth—that they’ve living beyond their means—so they bat around the issue, both keenly aware that they lack the life skills to survive should they even lose their looks or fall out of fashion. 

From there, Östlund shifts to a yacht cruise that Carl and Yaya could never come close to affording on their own, but have the status to get a room, perhaps because the other passengers are mostly ossified billionaires. Having two beautiful people on board is like adding perfume mist to pasty zombies like a hard-drinking Russian oligarch (Zlatko Buric) and his wife (Sunnyi Melles), whose idea of class generosity is to force the entire wait staff and boat crew to put on their swimsuits and zip down the waterslide. The film’s comic centerpiece is a dinner set during a massive storm where the crew, led by the relentlessly cheery Paula (Vicki Berlin) and a drunk socialist captain (Woody Harrelson), steadily go about their business while the passengers get seasick. And that’s just the start of a series of events that disrupts the cruise and gives minor figures, such as a toilet cleaner named Abigail (Dolly de Leon), an ascendent role to play. 

Choose your own metaphor here. The title refers to the “worry” spot on the face above the nose and between the eyebrow, a wrinkle that can be ironed out through Botox treatments. It’s also suggestive of a notorious region in the North Atlantic where aircraft and ships have tended to disappear, though this particular ship doesn’t cruise through Bermuda. Yet the fundamental instability of a super-yacht at sea, coupled with the wealthy’s assumption that money buys them every possible protection from disaster, gives Triangle of Sadness a terrific starting point for satire. Humans are vulnerable, and the structures propping up society are more fragile than assumed. The moment that money ceases to insulate the rich, what about them has value? One guy on board sells code to apps, another couple sweetly explains that they made their fortune in grenades. 

The pitiless gaze of Östlund’s camera, recalling contemporaries like Michael Haneke or Ulrich Seidl, has a deadpan effect that perfectly complements the desperate and absurd goings-on in front of it. Triangle of Sadness doesn’t leave audiences with much to unpack thematically—again, fish in a barrel—but it’s clear-eyed and hilarious about the systems that enforce societal inequities and what might happen if they were ever to unravel. In Östlund’s mind, it would look like the Mr. Creosote sketch in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. And that’s just for starters. — Scott Tobias

Triangle of Sadness opens tomorrow in limited release.

Hellraiser
Dir. David Bruckner
120 min.

Hellraiser has joined A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and the others in the pantheon of horror franchises whose roots go back to the 1980s (and in Halloween’s case, a little beyond), but it’s always been the odd fit next to those other spookshows. Even Freddy Krueger, for all his ties to the dream world, just wanted to kill his victims—and maybe wear their tortured souls on his chest. But Hellraiser’s Cenobites always had other plans. Specifically, they love to introduce those who play with their puzzle boxes to a world beyond pleasure and pain. Written and directed by Clive Barker, the original 1987 film efficiently distills the author’s edgy sensibility into a film that put only the thinnest veil over its sadomasochist themes. The Cenobites were terrifying but some of them, especially the leader known to fans as Pinhead (Doug Bradley), were also weirdly sexy, and their plans for their victims’ bodies and souls went beyond simple destruction.

After an exhausting string of sequels, the franchise tries to get back to first principles with this reboot written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski and directed by David Bruckner, the team behind last year’s excellent sort-of haunted house movie The Night House. In one sense, their Hellraiser delivers the goods. Created largely using make-up and practical effects, the film’s  Cenobites are creepy/alluring in the Hellraiser tradition and Jamie Clayton is particularly good as the new Pinhead (or “The Hell Priest,” as the credits have it). Odessa A’Zion delivers a strong lead performance as Riley, a (not very enthusiastically) recovering addict who comes into the possession of a familiar-looking puzzle box. The monsters are cool. The kills are memorably grody. Anyone hoping for a reprise of some famous lines from the original film will not be disappointed.

Sometimes, however, delivering the goods feels more like a task for courier services than an act of artistic expression. Bruckner keeps the atmosphere spooky and the nightmare visit to a creepy mansion that takes up much of the film’s last half has some neat twists. But it also turns into a cast-winnowing string of deaths that only underscore the thinness of the characters and the perfunctory nature of the whole enterprise (and the addiction subtext gets lost in the process). Beyond pleasure and pain lies a gray, formless dimension in which IP is kept alive by the blood of new entries. This Hellraiser only occasionally escapes it. —Keith Phipps

Hellraiser begins streaming on Hulu on October 7th.

Smile
Dir. Parker Finn
115 min.

Horror is a genre of trends and cycles, often built around specific beachheads like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Halloween or Scream or The Blair Witch Project—almost to the point where films of a certain era feel carbon-dated, easily identified after a few select minutes. But what era are we in now?  Writer-director Parker Finn’s clever, diverting new shocker Smile suggests It Follows and the films of Ari Aster—Hereditary and Midsommar—may be ascendent, which is excellent news for those who like thematically loaded, rigorously stylized horror films with an emphasis on psychological torment. It’s not nearly as good as its obvious influences—which is, of course, a feature of trends and cycles—but the mainstreaming of A24 art-horror has potential based on this evidence. 

Expanded from a short film, “Laura Hasn’t Slept,” Finn made in 2020, Smile is basically It Follows meets The Ring, though it does have a few nasty ideas of its own. Only one degree removed from Kevin Bacon in real life—and one on screen, a TV movie called Story of a Girl, directed by her mother Kyra Sedgwick—Sosie Bacon stars Dr. Rose Cotter, a hospital psychiatrist who deals with emergency crises. In her words, there is no such thing as “a normal case.” Yet there are levels of abnormality, like a patient who raves desperately about being stalked by an evil presence that appears to her in various human guises. The one common element: a creepy-ass smile. 

When the patient kills herself with a smile on her face, that’s disturbing enough for Rose, who vividly remembers witnessing her mother’s last moments when she was a child. But when various smilers start appearing wherever she goes—one from the courtyard below her office, another through a reflection in her home, etc.—she understandably worries that the same fate awaits her. It doesn’t matter how much credibility she has with her fiancé (Jessie T. Usher), her boss (Kal Penn) and her detective ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner), there’s no way to describe her situation that doesn’t make her sound crazy. Or simply too traumatized to think straight. 

The wicked little twist of Smile is that it’s “about trauma,” but not in the way you might expect. Without trying explicitly to wedge his film into the discourse, Finn has a good time fiddling with assumptions his characters—and the audience—might make about the underlying cause of Rose’s behavior, which isn’t so tidily explained. But mostly, Finn uses the strength of his conceit to turn the screws, raising tension through the Ring-like timeline Rose faces and the sheer relentlessness of her supernatural tormentor. At a certain point, it feels like the real question is whether she’ll be killed, too, or get so withered away psychologically that she does the job herself. Smile tiptoes on the edge of shamelessness in borrowing moves from better films—there are two Midsommar-like world-turned-upside-down shots; the surveillance-like camera moves into open space a la It Follows; and even a sequence that recalls Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse—but Finn mostly proves he has excellent taste. He’s curated a good time. —Scott Tobias

Smile is currently in theaters everywhere.