That’s “Triangle” (2009), which I played in the background while [1] S was at work (sorry … I wasn’t trying to be the deadbeat), [2] I was doing a little cleaning, [3] a cat insisted upon sitting on my lap and being scratched, and [4] I was contemplating my life choices.
It had the disadvantage of being a bit straight forward; it was a nice little package wrapped in a bow. It very much wants to be a mind-fuck movie, but it too easily makes sense. That having been said, it was also quite pleasant and nice. It even offered, if not twists, a few treats.
Here be spoilers of sorts.
I enjoy looking at things, be they stories or arguments or whatever, in a watered-down dialectic of sorts; it’s a kind of progression through negation. Here we have the “first” time through (from our ‘protagonist’s’ POV and as our POV) as a naive ‘victim’ of sorts, just trying to survive and make sense of the situation. Armed with the knowledge of a reveal, she then spends the second iteration attempting to negate the first and, in fact, discovers that things can be changed, that the loop is not identical each time. But she fails, so to speak, and takes part in a third pass through, and this third is interesting for two reasons. First, in shows us that we the second run-through was not actually a repeat of the first from the POV of the supposed antagonist; she does not get to play that role until the third pass. It’s also the point when she decides to fulfill the plot.
Along the way we saw a good deal of evidence that this cycle had been going on for some time; there was a pile of her lockets. We find a whole stash of similar corpses just piling up; the given dying character always—or at least frequently—goes to the same place to perish, further evidence of how much of this is not a matter of ‘free will.’ We get a callback, somewhat expected, to an earlier point, when the ‘Triangle,’ their boat, was about to get engulfed in a storm and receives a distress call on the radio; earlier they were on the receiving end and this time we see/hear the message being sent.
The ‘nice’ treat is that during each ‘iteration’ our POV character survives. During the first iteration our POV version vanquished the hooded version of herself, and we assume, perhaps, that she was mortally wounded before the fall, by the fall, or by drowning in the water. But in the third, when the hooded version is our POV character, we see her continue ‘beyond’ her vanquishing. She awakens on a beach with little crabs; earlier she’d had a dream of such a event. But then it turns out that she’s not on an island, but near to home, and as she returns home she arrives during the time of the beginning of the movie, so that we get to revisit the beginning of the film from another perspective. We do not get a happy ending here, but rather violence and then murder (or suicide). And then we get to fill in the blanks, we get our missing scenes from the beginning of the movie describing hour our main character got from her home to the dock/boat, and along the way we get a dead bird—in fact a whole beach of dead birds, probably from previous iterations—, a car wreck, and a new time chance to go through the ‘plot.’
What is ‘nice’ about that is how everything is wrapped with a bow in a structurally satisfying way. It’s not just the sequence on the cruiseliner that gets repeated, but we rather get callbacks to just about all significant moments/scenes, such as the ‘dream,’ which in retrospect is more a memory. Our main character’s traumatized behavior on the ‘Triangle’ is no longer due to the stress of dealing with her autistic son, but rather the result of what she’s gone through, and gone through, and … And the pile of lockets is paid off in the pile of dead bodies is paid off in the pile of dead terns. There’s an economy of storytelling going on here that I like, despite its obviousness.
I came across the movie some time ago but never got around to watching it. I’d probably only paid attention to it because I recognized Melissa George’s name in the cast, and I probably only paid attention to her because I used to watch Alias. When it came out in 2009 none of the co-stars would have registered with me, but now in 2012 I recognize, at least, Liam Hemsworth, mainly because of his older brother Chris (Star Trek, Thor, The Avengers …), and because he’s in The Expendables 2 (2012) (I’ve not watched The Hunger Games). I’ve been meaning to watch the director’s earlier movie Severance … at some point. The other day I was perusing TVTropes and following some page to another, probably dealing with time loops and/or recursive plots, etc., I saw Triangle mentioned, which jogged it in my memory … and the other day S and I finished season 7 of SG-1 and began season 8 … and that season concludes with the two-parter “Möbius.”
Appropriate, at least
