The Big Picture

• While time loops were popularized by comedies such as Groundhog Day, 2009's Triangle provides a glimpse into how scary a time loop can be.
• Starring Melissa George, the well-crafted horror thriller helped popularized a sub-genre known as "time-loop horror."
• The movie takes its inspiration from Greek mythology, particularly in the story of Sisyphus who was sentenced to spend eternity pushing the same rock up the same hill.

There is a very narrow subset of time travel movies that inspires the creation of graphs and diagrams, along with multiple rewatches. These movies have complex plots, generally involving different versions of the same characters existing at the same point in time. But beyond being too twisty to make sense of in a single viewing, these movies seem to promise that their intricate mysteries can truly be solved – and that the solution will be mind-blowing enough to be worth any amount of effort. Tenet is a movie like this. The legendary 2004 indie microbudget Primer is another. But, there's at least one more movie that belongs in this group, that makes you crack out the pen, paper, and spreadsheet software. That movie is 2009's Triangle. But unlike Tenet and Primer, Triangle isn't a sci-fi movie. Rather, it's the first major entry in the fast growing sub-genre known as "time-loop horror."

What Is 'Triangle' About?

Triangle is a horror movie with an appealingly nuanced setup. Our protagonist is Jess, played by Melissa George (Alias, The Mosquito Coast). Jess, we learn, works as a waitress, and is a single parent to Tommy, who has autism. As the movie opens, we see flashes of her daily routine, as she struggles to parent her son alone. The story kicks in when she shows up for a date with Greg, a repeat customer of hers, who also happens to be a wealthy, ruggedly handsome, outdoorsman. Greg has invited Jess out on his sailboat, along with a handful of his upper-class friends, who suspect Jess of chasing Greg's money. Everything is set up for us to root for Jess, but she sure does seem to be acting a little strange, as if she knows something terrible is going to happen.

Triangle was filmed in Australia, and the cast is all Australian, though the characters are all American. The fake accents give the movie a certain productive uncanniness, even though the cast is genuinely pretty good, and includes a couple of pre-breakout ringers in Michael Dorman (Patriot, For All Mankind), who plays Greg, and Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games, The Witcher), who plays Greg's working-class sailing buddy, Victor.

Despite being filmed in Australia, it's critical that the movie is set in Florida, because the "triangle" of the title is the Bermuda Triangle. Greg's sailboat drifts into a weird electrical dead zone, and is capsized in a sudden violent storm. Jess and the other survivors drift aimlessly on their capsized boat, before an ocean liner drifts by, named the Aeolus. Our survivors think they're saved, but the ship turns out to be completely empty, and to have perhaps been missing since 1932. And that's when things begin to get weird.

'Triangle' Is a Time Loop Movie With More Than a Few Surprises

The survivors board the abandoned vessel. This group includes Jess, Greg, Victor, as well as Sally and Downey, a yuppie couple (Rachel Carpani and Henry Nixon). It soon becomes clear that they are not alone, and are being hunted by a masked figure, who kills them one by one, until only Jess remains. After Jess is able to force the killer to jump off the Aeolus, Triangle plays its first card. Another capsized sailboat drifts out of the mist, and on it are another copy of Greg, Victor, Downey, Sally, and Jess. Jess has time traveled back to the beginning of the loop.

Jess soon learns the "rules" of the Aeolus. As soon as the set of survivors on board the Aeolus are all killed, a new capsized sailboat will appear with a fresh set. It will surprise no one who has seen Tenet that the masked figure turns out to be a future version of Jess herself (killing off the current crop of survivors so that a new set will appear, and she can use their boat to get home). Even in 2009, this wasn't really a fresh idea – Time Crimes, the debut film of Nacho Vigalando, played the same trick in 2007. But Triangle has a lot more up its sleeve. It lets us get comfortable inside the existing conventions of a time-loop film. It seems clear that everything that happened once will happen in every iteration of the loop, and that Jess will be unable to stop the horror from repeating itself. But then, the film adds a major twist. As we watch Jess try and save a version of Victor from dying in the second loop exactly the way he did in the first, we expect her to fail. But, she succeeds!

This is where the pen and paper diagrams come in. Because while Triangle does arrive at an emotionally satisfying conclusion after one viewing, it is comfortable leaving some of the details of its time loop mechanism unexplained. But the underlying math turns out to have been very carefully engineered, rewarding the patient. As it turns out, there are two interlocking time loops happening simultaneously, each to a slightly different version of Jess and the other survivors. Every survivor is doomed to be murdered by a version of Jess. But each Victor, every Greg, and all the Downeys and Sallys, have two possible death outcomes, which alternate. Adding to the complexity, the Jess of the other time-loop (what some Triangle explainers call the "even" time-loop, as opposed to the "odd" time-loop that "our" Jess inhabits) is evil. Sound like a lot? Well, you can watch the movie for yourself, and try and untangle it on your own. You probably know if you're the type of person who'd enjoy that. Fifteen years later, the internet is still writing Triangle explainers.

'Triangle' Is the Perfect Proof of Concept for Time-Loop Horror

As we all know, the concept of time-loops was first popularized in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, a comedy. But, while Groundhog Day is mostly about getting laughs, it doesn't shy away from the essential scariness of its premise – a random person is suddenly trapped in an endless repetition of a bad day, with no hope of escape. In fact, the movie drew inspiration from the horror genre. The potential horror of eternally reliving your worst moment has long been thought of as a fate worse than death, in both ancient myth and modern philosophy. And yet, it took a while for the first time-loop horror movie to show up, perhaps because Bill Murray's Phil was a little too good at emotionally managing the horror of his situation, while figuring out how to benefit from the lack of consequences in his purgatorial prison. Triangle showed how it could be done, and many horror films followed suit in exploiting the time-loop mechanics for scares.

Jess, it seems, is stuck in a literal afterlife. Aeolus, as we learn, was the father of Sisyphus, who, according to Greek myth, was famously sentenced by the gods to spend eternity pushing the same rock up the same hill. Perhaps Sisyphus is the first example of time-loop horror? Towards the end of the movie, we learn that, though Jess may have loved her son, she also physically abused him, and it's strongly implied she is now being punished for it. The intricate plot mechanics of Triangle increase Jess' eternal torment. Because her memory is wiped at the beginning of each "master loop," her experience of the film's nightmares is always kept fresh. The fact that she can seemingly escape and even alter the mechanics of the smaller time loops keeps her sense of hope alive, only to be repeatedly dashed. And the presence of an evil doppelgänger forces her to confront her worst nature again and again, while always allowing her to deny that the evil is actually a part of who she is – when acceptance of her own nature might be what sets her free.

But the most iconic image of Triangle might be what truly makes it a classic. While one of the pleasures of watching a protagonist stuck in a time loop is the persistent ability to get a clean slate, Triangle denies even that. Each iteration of the loop leaves a residue, as we learn when we see a pile of identical Sally corpses, piling up endlessly as Jess repeats the same mistakes. It's a disgusting image – repeated in other ways throughout the film – and being forced to view the accruing byproduct of an endless cycle of pain is what makes the feeling of dread linger after the movie has finished, and arrived back at its own beginning.

Triangle is currently available to stream Prime Video in the U.S.

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