Triangle 

The movie Triangle is a psychological horror film directed and made by Christopher Smith in 2009. It is basically a story about a woman named Jess who’s been very abusive towards her child. The movie showed how Jess and her friends got stuck in a time loop when they started going on a trip in the ocean. There are multiple versions of every characters existing in the boat that they stumbled upon which means that there could be an infinite amount of time periods overlapping each other. This movie symbolizes and referenced the greek mythology Sisyphus since Jess is similar to this because just as how Sisyphus escaped death, Jess tried to escape from her problems as well, which is the reason for her punishment being stuck in a time loop similar to how Sisyphus’ task is repeating over and over again. Confusing the viewers is really the main goal of this movie, because it requires analysis in order for the viewer to really understand the meaning of the story. Now, let us try to analyze it using themes and techniques, and literary lenses.

For the theme of the story, it mainly focuses on the theme Punishment as well as Guilt, because just as Jess felt guilty for abusing her child, she also received the punishment of being stuck in a loop afterwards. A scene for instance is when she remembered her abusive behavior towards her child, which is also one of the reasons for her fleeing. The time loop that she witnessed then served as her punishment, like a cycle of redemption.

For its technique applied, it is obvious for the viewer to know that this movie uses Temporal Distortion since it is one of the main factors that makes up the story. An evidence for this is because there are plenty of versions for all of the characters, specifically Jess. In the movie, we can see that Jess actually turned out to be fighting a different version of herself, and the time keeps on repeating and restarting. Although there may be differences in the events that repeat, the same particular event still happens again after the event with difference takes place. It may be hard to explain in texts, but that is the goal of the story, which is to confuse the viewer.

Another technique used in the movie is Irony, because we can see from the beginning of the movie that Jess tries to save her friends from the other version of Jess that she is not aware about, but then later on, she decides to become the one killing her friends, becoming the other version of herself that she was fighting in the first place. And just as I stated, this movie contains Symbolisms, where the ship named Aeolus came from the name of Sisyphus’ father. Aeolus is used to symbolize the Greek mythology of punishment in the movie. Another symbolism is how there are many versions of Sally piled up, which implies that there are multiple repeated failed attempts in escaping the loop.

For the literary lenses, on of the ones that we can choose for the analysis of this movie is the Reader-Response lens because this is the main lens used in the movie as it focuses on how the viewers would interpret or perceive the story. We can tell that the movie intentionally wants to confuse the viewers and they may also interpret the ending differently. Another one would be the Psychoanalytic literary lens, which is very impactful in this movie because it may focus on the mental state of Jess, her guilt towards her abuse, her trauma, and her denial of reality. With this, we can verify that the viewers may interpret the movie differently because while some think that the time loop may represent as the hell or purgatory subconscious punishment of Jess, some may also think that it is just her psychological breakdown.

Overall, the movie is very confusing but if you look deeper into it, the movie actually appears to be rewarding. Even if some may dislike this movie, for me, I would personally rate this movie an 8/10 because of its clever way of telling the story as well as its psychological depth.