Wish it was All Just a Dream

There are typical nightmares about being chased by certain monsters or flesh-eating zombies; nightmares on how you went to your senior prom completely butt naked and having everyone hysterically laugh at you and nightmares where you have to face your worst fears like a super radioactive spider-snake who wants to eat you. But like most nightmares they will end. The moment you open your eyes, you can finally escape and run to your momma who’ll tell you ‘It was just a dream.’ It would be way less frightening than say having a dream where you ride a mysterious ship sailing out in open waters with a maniac trying to kill you and your companions and having no means of escape only to find out that the killer is in fact you, or more accurately, another version of you and after a series of events you find that this nightmare was in fact not a figment of your imagination, but your bound reality that you will never be able to end or escape.

 

Triangle is exactly that, a nightmarish series of events which repeat themselves over and over again without any sign or glimpse of redemption or escape from a horrible fate. What makes the movie terrifying is the fact that the main character, Jess was living her nightmare over and over and over and over again. It was one thing to be able to go through such atrocities as she did and undergo all the confusion that was brought about by her very strange predicament, but it was just a totally new level of terror when the story progresses to reveal how everything was able to run its course again. Specially towards the end where she comes full circle (or full triangle, I should say) when you see her ring the doorbell at her house, kill her other self, pack the bag and comfort her child, I was reminded of the opening scenes that were shown and suddenly, that moment of realization that it will repeat over and over again has made me as an audience feel the character’s entrapment. I think in this sense, the film was really well put together; every single detail down to how her child’s paint spilled made a lot of sense. The story is compounded on in every single moment where a certain revelation of the repetitiveness of the events. Images of multiplicity such as that of the notes she wrote to herself, the lockets, the dead bodies on the deck and the seagulls all add to the feeling of ‘Oh my god this is never going to end is it?’

 

            The movie however offers no explanation whatsoever for what was happening, which made it even more chilling in the end. There was never really any sort of indication as to how she got into the cycle of horrible events, what was only apparent was that whether it was a dream or not, she was bound to repeat everything. Try as she might to escape, it seems even her attempts to get out of her situation were still weaved into the big picture of the plot of her never-ending nightmare. Even as she herself told her son, that it was all just a dream, and that everything was going to be alright, in the end, the audience knows at that instant, that this was the one of those nightmares that she would never wake up on