Triangle (2009)

The perfect loop. Well, maybe it's not really perfect, but if there would be a movie not leaving any question mark when it comes to alternate realities/time travel, it would probably be too much for this medium :)... To be fair, if for "Looper" I had around half an hour in a late evening train after to put together all the small details and answering how can all fit together to try convincing myself that "man, that might actually work...", since then I've grown older and I don't think I'm still patient enough to do that :). The irony is that "Triangle" was released earlier than "Looper", and here we are again - no pun intended ;) ... after all there were also others in the same niche ("Predestination", "Coherence").

After this intro, which probably doesn't say anything (besides that I'm probably obsessed with time travel), I should probably start talking about the movie, right? "Triangle" begins like that kind of horror where you're tempted on betting who dies first. We have three couples (well, more or less), which in a sunny day decide to sail on a yacht bearing the same name as the movie. The sun doesn't stay up for too long, we're getting a quick storm (good opportunity to win the bet we've been talking about), and we're left with 5 people stranded on the capsized yacht. Lucky them, it doesn't take long and a large cruise ship shows up at the horizon. Surprise, surprise, there doesn't seem to be anybody on board. Where the key phrase is... "doesn't seem". Second surprise - spoiler, but I can't write this entry without it - is that we find out that one of the five who just got on the cruise vessel was already aboard. And now we have two questions: 1. What the...? 2. Why only one?

Let's start with the simple one, question 2 is answered somehow by the "horror" trait that the movie seems to advertise in the first half an hour. Which proves to be a pretty false impression in the end. Maybe with an exception - if in "Shining" a huge empty hotel looked scary to you, just wait and see how an empty cruise vessel feels. But there won't be any ghost or any kind of spirit with distorted face, to just come up from behind the corner. What's happening on the deserted ship goes so much towards psychological thriller that I wouldn't really categorize it as horror at all....

Question 1 has an answer that in brief could be summarized to a repetitive temporal loop. In detail, there's much more to uncover, and maybe even more left to be explained. Maybe it doesn't look too different from other approaches on the subject, as the ones mentioned above, or the classic: "Groundhog Day". But... what if the loop doesn't close before it begins again? Well, here comes the triangle part. Or why the movie has the name of a boat that has something like 10 minutes of screen time. Meeting you from the past I think we've seen before, but getting also to meet a third copy it's a bit more rare. Now, comes the question, why only a triangle, and not going like this infinitely? Well... because as I said in the beginning: it's a perfect loop ;) How is that closed? Well, that's to be seen in the movie.

Rating: 4 out of 5