Unabashedly nonsensical and almost admirably committed to its hellish mindgames, Triangle is the kind of movie easily dismissed as "bad" by some (read: my siblings who watched it with me), but it's far too enjoyable to categorize so lazily. A series of hazy dreams/flashbacks/hallucinations begin the disjointed credit sequence that finally sets the viewer within the main plot with a distinct feeling of unease. Melissa George (in a seriously great performance that anchors the film) plays Jess, the single mother of an autistic son who leaves him behind for the day to go on a boat trip with a potential boyfriend and his gossipy, upper-crust entourage. The ideal sort of cast for this film (the only notable name is Liam Hemsworth, Thor's other brother), they all play their minimally-sketched-out roles with conviction and refrain from straying too far into throwaway horror types that we desperately want to see killed. A storm capsizes their sailboat and leaves them seeking refuge aboard a seemingly empty cruise ship named Aeolus, and the brief conversation about the implications of this allusion sets the tone appropriately. After the first major sequence aboard ends, the film takes on a sort of shaggy-dog feel, as Smith & Co. refuse to grant their audience the comfort of familiarity by building up to a singular "twist", employing instead a series of maddening images and mounting realizations that the story will not explain itself but will continue to confound its heroine and the viewers. The last twenty minutes feel almost as if the film is searching for an ending, but the penultimate "twist" is satisfyingly character-based. Recommended, if you have a sense of humor (and don't mind the requisite blood'n'guts [not too much, no]).
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