Triangle (2009)

Christopher Smith's Triangle arrives with the solemn weight of a Sisyphus reference and the tidy geometry of a puzzle box, and it discharges both without cracking a smile. Melissa George plays Jess, a single mother who leaves her autistic son behind for a sailing trip and then spends the rest of the running time being murdered by herself aboard a derelict ocean liner. It is a British-Australian co-production shot in Queensland, staffed almost entirely by white Australian actors standing in for Floridians, which is a matter of budget and geography, not of casting philosophy. Nobody in the ensemble exists to make a point.

The maternal material is where the film brushes against something like a theme. Jess's frustration with Tommy, an autistic boy rendered largely as noise and disruption, pushes her toward violence, and the narrative treats that violence as a sin to be punished by an infinite loop instead of a condition to be understood. The autistic son is a plot device with a diagnosis. The single mother is a survivor, but her survival is the machinery of the trap, not an argument about anything. A film can place a woman at its center without holding a position on women.

What remains is craft. The ship is a lovely, creaking set, the mirror sequence is a genuine pleasure, and the whole contraption holds together with more intelligence than most of its genre peers. It offers no sermon, no climate parable, no indictment of capital, no lesson about bodies or history. It simply wants to unsettle you, and then to do it again. The result is a film of nearly pure mechanism, which, in an era of cinema that cannot stop explaining itself, counts as a modest virtue.