When the pair embarks on a luxury cruise that Yaya is participating in as an influencer (she’ll pose eating pasta for photographs but won’t actually eat it), Östlund’s scope broadens to dissect the amorality and coddled insularity of the ultra-wealthy. The ship’s other passengers include a British couple who made the fortune in dealing arms (it’s a pity about those U.N. regulations concerning land mines, the hubby says—huge losses) and a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Burić) who got in the ground floor of the post-Soviet fertilizer market. He and the far-left captain (Woody Harrelson) trade Marxist and anti-Marxist quotes, at least until the oligarch is compelled to retort with Marx himself. Abigail (Dolly De Leon), who cleans the ship’s toilets, is dismissed by the passengers until a change in their situation—no spoilers here—means they can’t get along without her.
The movie is broadly divided into three sections (though the term “triangle of sadness” refers not to the narrative but to how someone describes the shape of Dickinson’s brow). Throughout Östlund’s dissertation, the shifting value of various currencies—money, food, sex—continually recasts the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
The filmmaker’s targets are fairly standard, maybe even fish in a barrel, and the movie, wildly overlong at two and a half hours, is more thesis-y and less complex than Östlund’s comparatively character-driven “The Square” or Force Majeure.” But it has its moments, particularly when the delicate-stomached cruise guests are forced to deal with serious seasickness, at which point Östlund’s genteel bile gives way to geysers of half-digested haute cuisine.
Cristian Mungiu’s “R.M.N.” is a Christmas movie—or at least a film set over the Christmas–New Year’s period that serves as a study of failed good will toward men. Matthias (Marin Grigore), a half-German, half-Romanian slaughterhouse worker, abruptly quits his job after knocking a truculent supervisor through glass and returns to the Transylvanian village where his son, Rudi (Mark Blenyesi), is being raised by the boy’s mother (Macrina Bârlădeanu). The kid has been recently been traumatized by something he saw in the woods. He won’t say what it was, or even talk at all.