The Triangle (2017)

directed by Andrew Rizzo, Lee Rizzo, Brick Patrick, Nathaniel Peterson, & Ciara Rose Griffin
USA
94 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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(going to talk about some thematic spoilers in here, also this is a movie you should go into knowing as little as possible. ok that's it)

The Triangle is about as close-knit as you can get: Every actor plays "themselves", the main actors directed and produced it, the compound it takes place in was apparently actually in operation for the two weeks it took to shoot the movie, and a lot of the reactions are unscripted. Nearly everything happens in real-time as it was happening on set, a fact which the camerawork highlights by at times having a dual-screen or even tri-screen perspective from multiple characters' points of view. Take all this and put it together and you have a remarkably authentic and organic film, which makes it all the more unsettling.

Once we first get to the cult/compound things are still relatively normal for a while, and the commune actually seems idyllic: everyone is very comfortable with themselves and others and it looks like an overall great place to be if you're the kind of person who's down with living out in the desert. The signs of anything being amiss are extremely subtle, but they seem to point to the typical picture you'd think of when you watch movies about cults; it looks like the leader might be poisoning or otherwise messing with his followers and some of the ideas people have are... not exactly Jonestown material, but they're a little unorthodox.

And then it hits. The reveal hits, and we realize that it isn't about the people. It was never about the people. The people are innocents with big ideas about the world and your run-of-the-mill hippie beliefs. How this movie spends a large part of its runtime masquerading as something completely different and still succeeds as an interesting and engaging movie, I don't fully understand.

Now once that twist hit and the full extent of the situation was revealed, my ability to review this coherently kind of went downhill, because the only thing I was thinking about was how distinctly wrong it started feeling; how perfectly these filmmakers were able to capture a sense of danger and mystery after filming what was basically a documentary. This doesn't fit the mold of what people try to make found-footage out to be- it's got an aesthetic, it's got a purpose, the camerawork doesn't suffer from being amateur. This might be one of the best found-footage movies I've ever seen.

They hit the mark exactly, and there isn't a moment of this movie that I thought shouldn't have been there. It's creepy without being forced, it leaves loose ends untied just enough to make you even more frightened by the time it all concludes, it comes from somewhere entirely different than what drives the majority of horror movies. If this is even a horror movie. It feels like science fiction but it also feels like nothing I've seen before and I know I'm constantly hyperbolic but this one really did blow me away.