LFF: Triangle of Sadness (ctba)

Mon 1 January 0001 - Wed 12 October 2022

Sweden | 2022 | 147’ | TBC | Ruben Östlund | Woody Harrelson, Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean

Riotously funny with a barbed wire-sharp wit, Triangle of Sadness garnered Ruben Östlund (The Square, Force Majeure) his second Cannes Palme d’Or award.

Couple Carl and Yaya (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean) are fashion models and influencers whose romantic relationship is increasingly soured by money. Offered free places on a luxury cruise, they find themselves sharing a superyacht with a Russian oligarch and some genteel arms dealers, while a deeply cynical Marxist alcoholic captains an increasingly chaotic ship. What begins as a great upstairs/downstairs set-up quickly turns entirely upside-down.

After taking on the art world in The Square, Östlund turns to his attentions to high fashion and the uber-rich, channelling a deep vein of acerbic black comedy. (In one of the film’s best set pieces, Woody Harrelson’s skipper drunkenly argues class and economic theory with a soused oligarch.) The filmmaker shifts audaciously from bone-dry satire to gross-out maximalist farce over the course of two hours. And with uncompromising clarity, he dissects our dependence on each other, while also examining the dynamics of power and privilege through the prism of beauty, wealth, class and knowledge. It’s a twisted tour-de-force which asserts that power corrupts. Absolutely.

BFI London Film Festival (#LFF) is bursting with a whole host of new films, series and immersive storytelling from around the world. Whether this is your first or 30th visit, our rich and varied programme means there is something for everyone. What’s more, all feature films and series are being shown in the UK for the first (and sometimes the only) time. Imagine who and what you can discover.