Triangle

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TRIANGLE got some positive press - 83% on Rotten Tomatoes - but bored the pants off all three members of my viewing party.

The secret to a scary horror is dread. Sadly, since Triangle is a time loop movie, all of the major events happen in the first half hour and are reshown multiple times from different angles. Fright-wise, it plays all its cards far too early, and the remaining surprises are purely intellectual ones, explaning in retrospect the odd sequence that happens when the cast arrive on the deserted cruise ship. Viewers will quickly relax into the movie, to the extent where those who normally watch horror films through their fingers will be twiddling their thumbs long before the halfway mark.

The secret to a good time loop movie is neatness. As much as you enjoy the drama of the denouement, you should also be coldly impressed by the skill with which it has been assembled. Sadly, Triangle doesn't close the loop very neatly. An unexpected and unwelcome diversion at the end of the film gives the impression that writer and director Christopher Smith struggled to find his way back to the beginning. A time looped narrative should be inexorably pulled back to its beginning - not meander aimlessly until it stumbles across it.

There are a small number of good creepy moments in the film, mostly involving the duplication of objects to drive home the eerie eternity of the heroine's fate. When she loses a locket down a grid, she peers through the bars and sees hundreds of identical lockets piled up below. How many times has she been through these motions? One mortally wounded character crawls out onto the deck, only to find herself surrounded by countless dead copies of herself from previous iterations of the loop.

That last one, especially, is a fine, eerie effect. But back on land, a similar trick involving dead birds fails to impress. The hoarding of duplicates makes sense within the reality of the cruise ship, but back in the real world, wouldn't people notice when the same woman kept returning to the roadside to throw yet another dead bird onto the beach below? Lastly, the final twist - that the heroine's autistic son was dead from the very beginning - was blindingly obvious from the minute George's character arrived at the harbour.

After the film, I found myself wondering why any of the plot had happened at all. Not in a time travel/ cause-and-effect kind of way, but in a deeper, more existential sense. Why was there a time loop in the first place? Why onboard a ship?

Overall, there was a good story in here. The problem is, it wasn't a horror, and it wasn't a feature length movie, and it was quite a few rewrites away from the finished article. With some brutal redrafting and a bit of explanation at the end, this could have made, say, a great episode of Doctor Who. As a horror movie, however, it failed to impress and gets a C-.

Triangle

From the maker of Creep; a scary and creepy UK thriller, and Severance; a horror comedy, comes another one-worded film, Triangle; a psychological thriller that is paced to perfection, edited well and layered to make you scratch your noggin. And scratch my noggin I did indeed do...I don't quite understand why her story keeps getting repeated. Is she being given a second chance? or is a psychological second chance? or just a way to show the audience that if you're evil, you're evil and there's no way of changing your fate?

Besides the complications of the plot, it delivered on a technical level. Melissa George is one hot momma! The best legs I have seen in a long time, and a nice chest too. A very good lead!

B