The Friday Night Horror Movie: Triangle (2009)

I don’t know how to write about this without spoiling a main plot point, so reader beware.

I love a good time loop movie. Groundhog Day wasn’t the first one of that type, but it perfected it and popularized it, and now it’s become a genre unto itself. Triangle takes the formula and gives it an interesting twist. Instead of our hero falling asleep and waking up to the same day over and over again (or getting killed and resetting to the beginning of the same day), she stays awake and in the same place while the other characters all die and then get reset and meet her again.

Six people take a sailboat out for a cruise. They mostly don’t know each other but are all connected to Greg (Michael Dorman), who owns the boat. Everybody is excited except Jess (Melissa George), who seems distracted and tired.

Things go well until they don’t. A sudden storm rolls in and capsizes the boat. All but one manage to climb on top of the wreckage. Soon they spot a cruise ship and hail it for help. They climb aboard but find it to be empty. Well, almost empty. They keep getting glimpses of someone, but that person seems to be hiding.

Jess gets increasingly paranoid. She keeps saying she’s been on this boat before. Then people start dying. Someone with a burlap sack over his head starts shooting people. Jess is the only one to survive. As she knocks the killer overboard, the killer says that they’ll be back and the only way to get home is to kill everybody.

Then a song plays over the radio, and Jess sees their capsized boat approaching. Except it isn’t empty; it is full of those original six people, including herself. Now here’s where the movie loses me a little. If it were me, I’d run up to my friends (and myself, I guess) and freak the frack out. I’d probably scare them at first, but I’d try to explain what just happened and let my friends try to figure things out. Jess does not do this. Instead she hides, then slinks around spying on the group. We’re treated to some of the same scenes we just watched but from different angles. She eventually tries to stop her friends from getting murdered. She does manage to change the timeline to varying degrees, but ultimately they all die again. 

I know I put a spoiler heading at the top of this, but I don’t want to spoil everything, so I’ll have to let the plot lie right there. In some ways the script is very clever about letting things unfold, and in other ways it is rather stupid. Jess makes some ridiculously bad decisions for no other reason than to let the plot go in the direction the writers wanted it to.

It manages to conclude itself in a very unexpected and yet satisfying manner. It finds a way to do something completely different from all the other time loop movies I’ve seen, and I love that. 

In the end I’d call it a good, but somewhat frustrating film, but one well worth watching.