Only a select few directors have won the Palme d’Or, the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival, more than once. The prestigious list of filmmakers includes Francis Ford Coppola for The Conversation and Apocalypse Now; Michael Haneke for The White Ribbon and Amour; and Ruben Östlund, who won in 2017 for the art world satire The Square and again earlier this year for Triangle of Sadness.
Described as a “wickedly funny” exploration of “the tawdry relationship between power and beauty,” Triangle of Sadness is about a “celebrity model couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), who are invited on a luxury cruise for the uber-rich, helmed by an unhinged boat captain (Woody Harrelson). What first appeared instagrammable ends catastrophically, leaving the survivors stranded on a desert island and fighting for survival,” according to the official plot description from distributor Neon.
Östlund credited his wife for the inspiration for Triangle of Sadness. “She’s a fashion photographer. When I met her, I just wanted to hear everything about her work and the fashion industry and to get an insider’s perspective of that industry. I had an outsider’s perspective and thought that the world was very cynical. She started telling me interesting facts and stories about that world. And I got very interested in looking at beauty as a currency,” he explained to the Hollywood Reporter.
You can watch the trailer above, because there’s never a bad time for a movie about rich people being the worst.
Triangle of Sadness opens on October 7.