Hollywood's Biggest Fall Movies Are All About 'Eating the Rich'
So much of pop culture revolves around the voyeuristic compulsion to catch a glimpse of how the other side lives. Culture consumption is more aspirational than ever, as we follow twentysomething influencers whose palatial big-city apartments are paid for by their parents, track multimillion-dollar celebrity home listings on Zillow, and hatefully—yet obsessively—keep up with the Kardashians. Nested deep within this notion there is a darker, anti-establishment (even anti-capitalist) compulsion: We want to see these people suffer.
At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, amongst historical epics about powerful female warriors and gentle autobiographical dramas about the childhoods of our most beloved directors, were a delightfully mean group of films whose nasty joys came from the deep-seated schadenfreude of watching someone who thinks they’re better than you be brought down to size. And down, and down, and down...
The most overt and obvious comes via the heavy hand of Swedish cringe-comedy maestro Ruben Östlund, whose previous film The Square peeled back the layers of pretension in the art world to reveal the hollow drivel in its center. Even the feature before that, his international breakthrough, Force Majeure, unraveled our notions of heterosexual gender roles while following the breakdown of a well-off family on vacation at a ski resort. His newest film, Triangle of Sadness, is set aboard a luxury yacht, observing gleefully as the boat’s rich passengers debase and embarrass themselves—and are debased and embarrassed in turn by nature itself.