The Tenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Triangle (2009), a neat sci fi horror film written and directed by Christopher Smith. It fuses taut slasher thrills with intricate time travel mind-screwing. 

Jess (played convincingly by Melissa George) agrees to go on a sailing trip with five friends. A freak storm capsizes their sloop, and the group crawls onto the upturned hull. Luckily (they think), a large ocean liner appears shortly after. Though no one answers their cries, the group is able to make their way onto the ship. It seems to be abandoned, until a mysterious stranger wearing a sackcloth mask starts killing them, one by one. 

Well, not really.

The mysterious stranger is actually Jess from the future. The ship is caught in some kind of temporal anomaly, perhaps related to what is purported to have sucked up vessels in the Bermuda Triangle (hence the title). Every half an hour or so, the ship travels back to the moment when it first appeared to the group on the upturned sloop. This means that duplicates of the characters board the ship while the versions of them we have been following are already there. Unfortunately, Jess will soon come to the conclusion that what causes the ship to reset is the deaths of all the other members of her group. The point in time that future Jess completes her bloody task, but herself gets thrown overboard, is when the group from the past appears. Present Jess mistakes this correlation for causation. She wants things to reset again so that she can warn the group not to board the ocean liner to begin with. This is how Jess decides to put on the mask and go on a murder spree. Sadly, she is not able to do this because she gets thrown overboard once again as she kills the last member of the group. And so on forever, in a hellish loop of reenacted carnage. 

Triangle is a cleverly put-together puzzle of a movie, with lots of enigmatic details planted as payoffs in light of later phases of the loop. It also achieves a brutal sense of Sisyphean futility by showing in increasingly grisly ways how many times Jess has already been through the loop. The one major criticism I have is that the otherwise brilliant plot only works because Jess is kind of an idiot. Not only does she leap to an irrational conclusion about what’s causing the ship to reset, a conclusion that winds up dooming everyone, but more annoyingly she fails again and again to act on opportunities to explain what’s happening to her past iterations. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, certainly, that someone finding herself in this situation would behave idiotically, but a much more crushing sense of infernal repetition could have been created if Smith had found a way to make this story work with a competent protagonist. 

The doppelgängers here, to get to our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, are the past and future manifestations of the characters. When Jess’ understanding and resulting course of action changes, she becomes a villainous double to her former self, even though that self will eventually come to the same understanding. We often look back upon deeds perpetrated by old versions of ourselves with disgust or shame, such that if we could return to the past, we would try to make ourselves behave differently. Meanwhile, we would regard someone who looked identical to us and wanted to force us to change as a monstrous imposter. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the doppelgänger, then, is that there is no objective way to determine who is fake and who is genuine when it’s only a matter of time before we all become our own doppelgängers.