Triangle of Sadness an endurance test

A 15-minute vomiting scene is challenging viewers of Triangle of Sadness.

A scene from Triangle of Sadness, directed by Ruben Ostlund.

Well, did you see it? Did you go over the weekend? And, most importantly, did you walk out in disgust? Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness has become one of “those” films. Think Reservoir Dogs, Antichrist, Irreversible or 127 Hours – movies that contain sequences of such visceral provocation that audiences frequently flee from the cinema rather than endure the agony on screen.

In Triangle of Sadness it’s a 15-minute communal vomiting set piece, halfway through the film, that occurs on board a luxury yacht during dinner time in a storm. The film is a social satire (the mega-rich are drowning in the chunder of their overconsumption) that is funny, witty and deviously clever. But the spectacular barfing scene has become notorious. Critics bolted from the Cannes Film Festival screening in May and walkouts were commonplace after the film’s US release, while sick bags were handed out to the black-tie crowd attending the movie’s London premiere.

“I really want an audience to experience something when they are in the cinema,” says Ostlund, who won the Palme d’Or for the film, having won it in 2017 for his art world satire The Square. “And vomiting in movies can seem a bit silly. But if you push it 10 steps further than the audience expects then something different happens. And of course when you take it to that extreme some people will be provoked, and some people will maybe even leave the cinema. But that’s just something you have to deal with if you want to make images that we’ve never seen before.”

Ostlund says that he had written on his shooting script for the movie: “During the scene in the yacht where the people start vomiting it will not become anything unless I go further.”

He filmed the sequence over three long weeks in March 2020, on a soundstage in Trollhattan in western Sweden.

The yacht’s dining room was recreated on a giant hydraulic gimbal that swayed and lurched to replicate the vessel’s storm-tossed motion and gave several of the crew members, including the director of photography, Fredrik Wenzel, sea sickness. The scene is a slow-build stomach churner, the formally attired characters facing a five-course, fish-based extravaganza and gradually succumbing in outright, camera-splattering mayhem.

“When the actors are getting sick over and over again, we had tubes going into their mouths connected to air-pressure pumps that allowed us, with one press of a button, to fire out endless amounts of rosehip soup, which is what we mostly used for the vomit.”

Ostlund says that the timing of the production, at the beginning of the pandemic, created an ineffable sense of unease around the set piece. “It was kind of an awkward sequence to shoot at that particular time,” he says.

“Everyone was scared of people even coughing in their direction, and yet we were filming this enormous vomiting session! So maybe it added something.”

He says too that he had very clear intentions for the sequence, which follows stricken diners from the captain’s table to the ship’s stairwell to their private bathrooms. There they slide about next to overflowing lavatory bowls and skid across sodden floors while lathered in their own rejectamenta.

“I wanted the audience, at a certain point, to start thinking: ‘Please, save them, they’ve had enough!’ Even if these are characters we want to take a little revenge on because of their advantage in life and their spoilt behaviour, I still wanted the audience to think: ‘No! That’s enough!’ And at that point my plan was to go even further.

“So, the people who are leaving the cinema? Maybe they are the ones who have the most empathy.”

Ostlund is keen to point out that Triangle of Sadness is an unusual entry into the long historical tradition of so-called endurance cinema. Audiences were reported to have been vomiting in the aisles in Kansas during the ultra-violent climax of The Wild Bunch in 1969. Quentin Tarantino claims that he counted 33 walkouts during a festival screening of Reservoir Dogs (the ear-slicing scene, naturally). Roughly 20 per cent of the audience at Cannes and Sundance Film Festival fled from screenings of Gaspar Noe’s 2003 shocker Irreversible during the film’s repugnant nine-minute rape sequence. In 2010 it was reported that at the Toronto Film Festival three people fainted and one person had a seizure during the arm-sawing scene in Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. This year, social media posts alleged that viewers had walked out of Alex Garland’s Men during its birth-within-a-birth-within-a-birth sequence.

The difference with Ostlund’s film? “For me, I would never be interested in provoking an audience with something as simple as sex or violence,” he says. “They have been used so many times in cinema to get a reaction. Violence doesn’t interest me at all, neither does using sexuality in that context. But I think it’s completely fine to provoke the audience with something like vomiting. All of us have done it. It’s not unusual.”

He notes, however, that working on the film so closely, for so long – the barfing sequence took six months to edit – meant that he almost lost sight of the scene’s power. “Maybe I misjudged a little bit what vomiting means for us,” he says. “I think the reason people react so strongly to the scene is because of a survival instinct we have associated with bacteria and infection and so on. So I think people are reacting to it in a more primal way than I expected.”

As for the film’s legacy as a hard-to-handle classic, he says: “Of course you’re happy when people are talking about your film in connection to film history. But I also want to leave a mark as a director. My goal is to make films that people will remember.”

Consider it done.

The Times

Triangle of Sadness opens in Australia on December 26.