Ruben Östlund's cinema operates like an entomological laboratory. The Swedish auteur, a modern-day Fabre of human misery, doesn't merely observe his creatures—post-crisis, perennially insecure Western homo sapiens—but builds for them increasingly elaborate and cruel terrariums in which to study their reactions under stress. If in Force Majeure the enclosure was an avalanche and in The Square the contemporary art world, with "Triangle of Sadness" the experiment reaches a monumental, almost cosmic scale. Östlund builds a 21st-century ship of fools, a Noah's Ark in reverse that aims not for salvation, but for an eschatological purification through bodily fluids, and launches it into a stormy sea of capitalist contradictions.

The film, like a Flemish triptych painted by a Bosch with an Instagram account, is structured in three distinct panels, each dissecting a different form of power. The first chapter, "Carl & Yaya," introduces us to the glossy purgatory of fashion and influencer culture. Here, beauty is not an intrinsic value but a currency, a "capital asset" to be monetized before its inevitable devaluation. The now-famous argument over splitting the check at a restaurant between the two model protagonists is a masterpiece of cringe-comedy and a miniature essay on gender dynamics in the post-Me Too era, where traditional roles have imploded, leaving behind a neurotic and transactional void. Östlund films this squabble with his usual, ruthless patience, transforming a banal lovers' quarrel into a synecdoche for the relationship between perceived value, economic power, and male fragility. It's a Molière comedy rewritten by Michel Houellebecq, where what's at stake is not honor, but the follower count.

But it is in the second act, "The Yacht," that Östlund's apologue unfurls its broadest and most mephitic sails. The luxury vessel, a floating microcosm of global inequality, becomes the true stage for the farce. On board is a gallery of caricatures so precise they transcend stereotype to become archetype: the Russian fertilizer magnate (literally, "I sell shit"), the elderly and amiable British arms manufacturers, an alcoholic Marxist American captain (a magnificently nihilistic Woody Harrelson). The director orchestrates this bestiary with the precision of a sadistic demiurge, setting the stage for the sequence destined to enter the annals of cinematic grotesquerie: the captain's dinner.

As a biblical storm rocks the yacht, the wealthy passengers, accustomed to bending the world to their will, are forced to confront a power they can neither bribe nor buy: physics. Nature. And, more precisely, their own physiology. What follows is a symphony of vomit and diarrhea, an emetic catharsis that serves as the most direct and corporeal response to decades of cinema about class struggle. Östlund takes the formal elegance of Buñuel—the ghost of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie hovers over every course of spoiled seafood—and contaminates it with the brutal carnality of Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe. The result is a visceral pandemonium, a medieval carnival in which the kings and queens of finance are dethroned by their own bowels. The verbal sparring match between the Russian capitalist and the American communist, trading quotes from Reagan and Lenin over the intercom as the ship sinks into chaos, is the perfect closing remark: ideology reduced to a parlor game for drunks, while true power—the material power of the body and of nature—reclaims its primacy. It is the triumph of the repressed, the return of the real in liquid and malodorous form.

If the second act was hell, the third, "The Island," is a Darwinian purgatory. The few survivors of the shipwreck find themselves on a deserted island, and the social structure, so rigid on board, is upended in an instant. In this new state of nature, which echoes Golding's Lord of the Flies as much as—and perhaps more pertinently—Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away, economic and cultural capital becomes worthless paper. The only currency that matters is practical skills. And so Abigail, the Filipina toilet manager—invisible and silent on the yacht—emerges as the undisputed matriarch, the only one who can fish and start a fire.

Here, Östlund avoids the trap of easy revolutionary rhetoric. His is not a proletarian utopia. The inversion of the social pyramid does not lead to equality, but simply to the creation of a new, equally ruthless hierarchy. Abigail takes control of the food and, consequently, of bodies (particularly that of Carl, the model, who trades sexual favors for extra rations of octopus), replicating the very dynamics of exploitation she herself had endured. Power, Östlund seems to suggest with a blood-chilling cynicism, does not liberate: it corrupts, regardless of who wields it. Human nature does not tend toward communal anarchy, but toward a constant renegotiation of dominance structures. The ambiguous, suspended ending, fraught with almost unbearable tension, leaves the viewer with a piercing question: is civilization merely a thin veneer, ready to peel away, or is brutality the only authentic form of order possible?

Certainly, one could accuse Östlund of being didactic, even painfully obvious in his critique. His satire lacks the surgical finesse of a Haneke or the surreal lightness of the aforementioned Buñuel. It is a satire that uses a jackhammer where others would use a scalpel. But this supposed "lack of subtlety" is, in fact, its greatest strength and its most acute insight into our times. In an age of hyper-communication and sensory overload, where outrage lasts for the span of a tweet, perhaps only a work so brazenly, corporeally, and intelligently brutal can still shake our conscience. "Triangle of Sadness" is not a film that whispers, but a liberating and disgusted scream. It is a total work of art, a pitch-black comedy that morphs into Greek tragedy and then into a treatise on political anthropology, all without ever losing its impeccable rhythm and its wicked, infectious lucidity. A caustic and necessary masterpiece that shoves the deformed reflection of our civilization in our faces, forcing us to watch—and to laugh—as it all goes under.