Fright Place, Wrong Time: Triangle is a Brutal Puzzle Box

By all accounts, we're in a Golden Age for horror movies right now: Jordan Peele's original nightmares keep breaking records, A24 is putting out some of the best films of our time alongside some of the most fucked-up, and there's seemingly a new Stephen King adaptation getting released every month at this point. In "Fright Place, Wrong Time," we'll look at a new scary movie each week, from the tentpoles to the cult gems, to see if great horror really was around the whole time, or if right now really is so gruesomely special.

Triangle (2009)

Do not watch the trailer for Triangle. Ideally, you would stop reading this article and go watch the movie. It's not high art, but it relies deeply on its hidden twists and tricks, and if there's one thing we know about movies from 10 years ago, it's that people couldn't cut together a decent, spoiler-free trailer to save their lives.

Triangle, written and directed by Christopher Smith, received only a small release in a handful of countries—it never made it into U.S. theaters at all and has made roughly 1.5 million dollars total to this day. Safe to say, this is a film that would have been entirely buried were it not for the handful of people who *did* see it, told other people to see it, and in doing so turned Triangle into something of a cult horror.

Melissa George plays Jess, a strangely haunted woman who, after a very short opening to help us catch our bearings, heads out on a boat trip with a friend and a small group of strangers. A storm approaches, the boat gets overturned, and the group is suddenly stranded in the middle of the ocean. All this happens within the first ten minutes or so, after which a massive ocean liner appears on the horizon. The group hops on the ship, the shit hits the fan, and then more shit just keeps on hitting a bigger and bigger fan.

It's a deserted ocean liner, you see, with cryptic paintings scribblings hinting at some kind of tie to Greek mythology. When the gang splits up—why do people in horror movies like to "cover ground" so much? You've got time! Stay together!—they realize they're not entirely alone after all. A masked stranger is running around the halls and killing them for... fun? That would be where a lot of horror movies would end their ambitions, but Smith reveals the identity of the killer quickly, and its reason for dispatching these harmless idiots is a joy in itself. (Along with a few grizzly images you won't be able to shake.) But it's not just a maniac with a gun at play here—time loops and doppelgängers factor into this ghost liner, sending Jess (and the film) into a complex, trippy spiral that'll make you want to put up one of those red-string conspiracy boards to track the multiple timelines and their various outcomes.

There is a method to the director's madness that keeps the film from ever becoming incomprehensible, blessedly, plus a final twist that delivers an emotional gut-punch while stitching together the gruesomeness into a cogent outcome. Which is a small grace, given how much the film's air of helplessness and dread will stick with you.

Triangle is streaming for free on Amazon Prime right now.

Originally Appeared on GQ