Triangle (2009)

Triangle (2009), written and directed by Christopher Smith.

The seagulls are not what they seem.

Causal loops are not caused just by time machines: sometimes guilt is so intense that the mind dissociates from this reality and we have stories like David Lynch's Mulholland Dr (2001) or Lost Highway (1997), or like Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010).

Guilt can project one into a purgatory or hell of recurrence, always rolling that stone up a hill but never escaping.

Melissa George is lost, confused, at first struggling and then hopeless. An oddity of this story is that she takes others along with her. They are really confused. Sometimes they suggest to her solutions to her paradoxes just as the audience might; doesn't do any good.

Another oddity is that we accumulate during turns of the loop. This is inconsistent: at the end we have a pile of dead seagulls on the beach but not a pile of crashed red cars on the road. This is not the sort of story where it all makes sense in the end. It is more of a nightmare world.

I thought of Lynch and his fascination with corridors. Even that ominous bass drone emerges.

The middle of the film is a succession of strange things just on the verge of lagging, but recovers without giving us time to try to understand.

Usually the later denizens of the loop clean up the earlier. This time Jess kills her later self and is kicked back to the beach.

Room 237 makes an appearance.

I thought there was a monstrous multi-year thread on AVSForum about this film but I can't find it. Did I dream that or was it deleted? Different time-line?

Available on Blu-ray.