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FILM CRITICISM
Self-Fulfilling Mystery
Triangle (2009, dir. Christopher Smith)
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What did the friends ever do to deserve this?
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As a mystery thriller that invites the audience into an intellectual duel through motifs drawn from Greek mythology, it is excellent — provided you can simply enjoy the game without getting bogged down in miscellaneous questions.
It also find myself thinking of another film I saw a few years ago: D.C. Hamilton’s The Fare. That indie film gets an incredible amount of mileage out of a single taxi, a couple of actors, and the Hades-and-Persephone motif. Triangle is a little more demanding than that — or, to put it more elegantly, a film of considerably greater artistic merit.
In any case, a film built around puzzle-solving can only be discussed by solving its puzzle. That’s exactly what I’m about to do, so I’d ask that you keep that in mind.
That said, worrying about spoilers is almost beside the point. The film scatters blatant clues from the very beginning. The yacht bears the name Aeolus, the god of the winds. A painting of Sisyphus hangs prominently aboard the ocean liner. And in a film with remarkably little dialogue, it takes the time to recount in detail the punishment of…
