Triangle
I enjoy a time loop. Jess goes off on a yacht with a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends, including a Hemsworth, and they get caught in a huge storm and capsize. I will say off the bat that there were very ropey effects here, we’re all just keeping our eyes on the prize until we get onto the actual physical set that we have, which is a giant cruise ship with supposedly nobody on it. Except there is, in fact, at least one person on it, who tries and more or less succeeds to kill everyone. Spoilers, it’s actually Jess from the recent past.
Now there are some subtle bits. It’s a clever conceit that we think we’ve broken out of the loop when in fact the loop is just larger than we think, and there are three Jesses as any one moment. (How did this start then? Never mind that). She finds evidence of how many times she’s been through it, with all the scraps of paper, the heart necklaces and, in the best moment of the movie, a huge pile of Sally’s dead bodies. This did lead me to thinking that, since these things all take up physical space, they would at some point completely fill the boat, and have them all climb up the stairs and have Sally be faced with a vertiginous cliff made of her own corpses. I also kind of thought it might have ended with Jess escaping to an island populated entirely by herself, but those things did not happen. I did notice as well that when one of the dudes was dying, he said that Jess had shot him, when we - in Jess’s perspective - in fact had not seen that happen.
This all sounds very intricate and clever now that I’ve written it out, but once you’ve realised the loop-the-loop structure, a lot of it is very obvious. I was a little disappointed we hadn’t actually broken out of the loop, even at the point of being ostensibly half way through it. The names are a little on the nose - Triangle! There’s three of them!, Aeolus? That’s the father of Sisyphus, I wonder how that might be relevant. The end lets us know that she’s actually in a purgatory loop for being a bad mother to her autistic son, and crashed into it after killing her other self and dumping her own other body in the boot of the car (again, how did this start?).
Still, I enjoy a time loop. Jess goes off on a yacht…