Review: Triangle (2009)

Directed by: Christopher Smith | 94 minutes | horror, thriller | Actors: Liam Hemsworth, Melissa George, Rachael Carpani, Emma Lung, Michael Dorman, Henry Nixon, Joshua McIvor

Jess (Melissa George) doesn’t seem to have her life in order, but her son is everything to her. Despite her confused state, she goes on a sailing trip with her boss and his friends. She has a premonition that something bad is going to happen. We keep seeing a seagull chasing her everywhere. Jess’s suspicion comes true when they are caught in an inexplicable local storm in the middle of the sea and are shipwrecked. A large steamship seems to offer the rescue, but turns out to be a nightmare. One without end.

‘Triangle’ starts calm and rippling, but after the storm the story comes loose. A curse appears to rest on the large ship, resulting in death. The ship has been abandoned except for one, a masked woman whose goal is to kill everyone on board. Danger is around every corner on the large ship with many corridors. Jess has a great survival instinct, she only wants one thing and that is to see her son again. She manages to survive and receives a message from the unknown woman before she dies: she must kill everyone on board. It soon becomes apparent why, for some inexplicable reason there is a flow in time and when everyone is dead everything starts again from the moment they all came on board alive, including themselves. And that half-wrecked sailboat may well be the only way out.

Films that keep coming back at the same moment in time and where the storylines are mixed up are a risk. The story must be very well boarded up because mistakes can easily be made. This is also the case with ‘Triangle’. If Jess gets into the same fight for the second time but now experiences it from the other side you would think she knows what’s going to happen because she’s been through the same thing exactly once before. Not so. In another scene she has suddenly become a spectator from a victim of a car accident. A pity.

Yet ‘Triangle’ slowly creeps under your skin and little by little the misery seeps into you more and more. This is partly because the atmosphere in the film has been kept very realistic by making many outdoor shots and filming during the day. The standard work of a ship / village / house by night has not been chosen and this makes it just a bit more plausible. In addition, the feelings of fear, panic, despair and sadness are kept fairly constant throughout the film. Once from the ship, the nightmare does not end and neither do the emotions.

The run-up to ‘Triangle’ is long. In fact, wandering the corridors on the steamship is boring, everyone keeps shouting hello with the expectation of meeting the crew. The film also does not escape any predictability and collapse moments. And unfortunately not all ends are tied together. What ‘Triangle’ does succeed in is to give you a bad feeling and that is the goal of a psychological thriller.