In 2017, Ruben Östlund won the Palme d’Or for The Square, a caustic evisceration of the art world; this year he was awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize for a second time with Triangle of Sadness, in which his satirical arrows are targeted at the excess and vanity of the super-rich with frequently uproarious results. Carl (Harris Dickinson), a young male supermodel, and his girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean), a successful social media influencer, have snagged a free cruise on a luxury yacht, with an idiosyncratic, Marx-quoting, frequently inebriated captain (Woody Harrelson). Among their fellow passengers are Winston and Clementine, elderly British arms manufacturers, and Dimitry, a slovenly Russian fertiliser magnate. Assembling for the captain’s gala dinner on a storm-tossed night, the rogues’ gallery of grotesques is inflicted with a series of humiliations that reveal the vulgar reality beneath their gilded exteriors.

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS contains a sequence of flashing lights which might affect customers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.

Notes by David O’Mahony