SICKENINGLY RICH

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS Ruben Östlund’s queasy Cannes-winner turns on the one per cent…

Ipushed it as far as I could,” says Ruben Östlund, talking about his new film Triangle Of Sadness. “I didn’t have any limit. I wanted to do the first film scene in the world where someone actually is shitting and throwing up at the same time. And I have never seen that before.” Neither has Teasers. In a sequence that makes Mr. Creosote’s vomiting in Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life look like a mild case of indigestion, passengers on a luxury yacht buffeted by a violent storm are soon hurling their haute cuisine. And it goes on. And on. And on.

Then again, this should be no surprise. This is the Swedish director of The Square, the scathing satirical stab at the art world that took home Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 2017. That Östlund repeated the trick this year for Triangle…, joining that rarefied group of filmmakers to twice win Cannes’ top prize, confirms him as one of world cinema’s hottest directors. This time, he aims his broadsides at the superwealthy, in a story that has echoes of The Admirable Crichton, the 1957 comedy in which a group of aristos are shipwrecked and turn to their butler to help them survive.