'Triangle of Sadness': Behind the award-winning, critically acclaimed 'most disgusting movie of 2022'

It’s the kind of scene that would make Stand by Me’s “Lard Ass” proud.

The s*** (and the vomit) nearly actually hits the fan in Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund’s dark comedy about a fashion model couple (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean) who are invited onboard a luxury cruise for the ultra-wealthy. When a surging storm combines with spoiled seafood, it leads to a good old-fashioned barf-o-rama among the ship’s eccentric, filthy rich passengers — all while Woody Harrelson’s drunken captain reads The Communist Manifesto over the loud speaker.

The outrageous, instantly infamous 15-minute depiction of projectile vomiting and flooding defecation caused walk-outs at its May premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (where it also earned an 8-minute standing ovation and sailed home with the event’s prized Palme d’Or award) and has the BBC wondering if it makes Triangle the most disgusting movie of 2022.

The sequence also plays into why many critics and early viewers are extolling the film as a blistering take-down of the world’s elite, or the 1%, or whatever you’d like to call them — in the same fashion as Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 Oscar champ Parasite. By the time the cruise ship’s gaggle of surviving passengers end up on a deserted island with some of its workforce, you wonder if the rich are literally going to be eaten.

Not so fast, though, says Östlund, the 48-year-old Swede whose last two films — 2014’s Force Majeure and 2017’s The Square — have also been international cinematic sensations.

“I’m not a fan of the ‘eat the rich’ way of promoting the film. I don't think there's any reason to eat the rich,” Östlund says of the anticapitalist or income inequality slogan that’s become popular at progressive rallies in recent years. “It’s the system that should be criticized.”

Östlund says he doesn’t portray the rich people as “mean and egotistic,” pointing to one elderly couple who appear sweeter than stolen honey, only for Carl (Dickinson) and Yaya (Dean) to discover they’ve made their fortune manufacturing military weaponry.

“I love the contradiction of how we conventionally portray people doing mean things. But this very nice couple, they have made all their money on selling landmines and grenades. I love the contradiction in that, because then you have to start to look at it from the context of their behavior, from the systematic society level of their behavior.”

To Östlund, his film is far more about “beauty and sexuality as a currency.” It’s why Yaya, a supermodel and influencer, is invited onto the cruise — free of charge — in the first place. “Your looks paid for the tickets,” one of their dinner mates, who’s made his fortune in fertilizer, says to the young couple. “Not bad, huh?”

Despite its accolades and awards, there’s a cloud of real-world sadness hanging over Triangle recently. In late-August, Dean, the 32-year-old South African model and actress who’d previously appeared on The CW’s Black Lightning and delivers a breakout, star-making performance in Östlund’s film, died suddenly after a brief and unexpected illness in New York City.

Östlund first met Dean during the casting process four years ago, and estimated they spent upwards of a hundred days working together throughout the course of production.

“It was during the pandemic and it was a very close environment, a small group, spending an intense period in our life together. And it was really an ensemble movie… And I think that everybody got very close to each other during this shooting. And then of course there's always tragedy when someone is passing that is young.

“We were just about to go off and do this [press] tour together and go to [the Toronto International Film Festival] and have the whole ensemble standing there presenting the film together. And all of a sudden there’s one spot that is missing. Someone is not standing there and taking part of the credit for the work. So that has been something that’s felt really, really sad on a level that was unexpected… But knowing that her family was proud of the film, and Charlbi was so proud of the film after Cannes, [we look at it as a way to] pay tribute to her work. It would've been so interesting to see which part she would've taken after this… So, yeah, it is sad, but at the same time, I hope that the film can be a way for us to pay tribute to her family and to her, and her work as an actress.”

Triangle of Sadness is now playing in select theaters.

Watch the trailer: