Triangle (2009): The Sci-Fi Horror Movie's Ending & Time Loop Explained

The 2009 Triangle movie is a relatively uncelebrated science fiction movie that explores the themes of sin and punishment in a constantly changing plot that keeps audiences engaged and guessing every step of the way. Directed by Christopher Smith, Triangle is a British-Australian film that follows a group of friends on a boat trip that goes horribly awry. A mystery soon begins to unravel into a truly bizarre tale of science fiction horror. Triangle stars Melissa George as protagonist Jess, a single mother of an autistic son.

Jess’ struggles with the daily difficulties of caring for a son with autism are put in relief against the movie’s time loop plot, which threatens to never release Jess, forcing her to relive traumatic experience after traumatic experience. The audience follows Jess’s struggle to escape the loop and make it back home to safety. With some unique mythological parallels combined with a modern look at time travel, sin, and punishment, Triangle delivers a truly compelling story. But it does so in an open-ended way that may leave some audience members scratching their heads without multiple watches.

What Happens In Triangle

Jess Is Involved In A Never-Ending Time Loop

Triangle is filled with hints and allusions to the real story of what’s happening that aren’t obvious until the entire film is viewed. The movie begins with Jess yelling at her autistic son Tommy (Joshua McIvor) for leaving his toys outside, asking, “What’s wrong with you?” That morning, Jess has been invited on a boat cruise with some friends, and she packs up Tommy to take with her. Just before they leave, the doorbell rings but when Jess answers, no one is there. The scene then jumps to the dock, with Jess preparing to get on.

Conspicuously, Tommy isn’t there. Even more strangely, Jess seems unperturbed. She joins her friends Greg (Michael Dorman), Sally (Rachael Carpani), Downey (Henry Nixon), Heather (Emma Lung), and Victor (Liam Hemsworth) for a day on the water, but a strange call from an unknown woman pleading for help dampens the mood. A sudden storm blows in and capsizes their sailboat. They drift to a floating ocean liner and board after seeing someone on the bridge but find the boat deserted, though covered in blood. Quickly, the group begins to mysteriously die off, with some blaming Jess and others, a masked assailant.

Triangle then dips into the weird when Jess sees another capsized boat approaching the liner with doppelgängers aboard, who look just like her and her friends. More killings and the arrival of doubles occur before Jess dons the assailant’s burlap sack mask, kills her friends, and is thrown from the boat. She wakes up on the beach and returns to her home, where she sees a version of herself fighting with Tommy, just as she did that morning.

Jess kills the doppelgänger, takes Tommy, and gets into a car crash that kills mother and son. The scene pans away from the wreckage to show another Jess staring in disbelief before grimly setting back out to the boat and her friends to begin the cycle again. Triangle is not an easy story to explain beat by beat, so a further examination of the time loop mechanics and symbolism is required to understand the film.

Life Before The Start Of Triangle

The Time Loop Does Not Start Until A Few Scenes Into The Movie

The real story of Triangle begins before the movie does. Jess is a presumably single mother of a son with autism. The challenges that come with raising a child with autism have strained Jess, and the movie starts with Jess expressing this frustration in an unfortunate way by berating him. While it may not be fair to judge Jess on this one morning, Triangle is not interested in fairly punishing its protagonist and instead uses this incident as the rationale for the ordeal it’s about to put its character through. It’s a horror movie, after all.

Jess wishes for “just one day off” from taking care of Tommy and her wish is cruelly granted. After this fight, Jess takes her son in the car to go on the boat with Greg and their friends. They never make it. Jess gets in a car crash and she and Tommy die.

Right before the crash, as shown at the end of the film, Jess sees a seagull, a marching band with the name of the ocean cruiser she finds, and hears the band play “Anchors Aweigh,” all allusions to what happens out at sea. It’s after this crash that the time loop begins for Jess.

Whether this is punishment for her behavior towards Tommy, being somewhat culpable in his death, wishing she had a day away from him, or some other past transgression, is never revealed.

Why The Movie Is Called Triangle

The Title Has A Significant Meaning

The setting for the time loop is Greg’s boat. Again and again, Jess goes on Greg’s boat, gets capsized, and floats to the abandoned ocean liner. This is where the title of the movie becomes key. Triangle could have a few meanings, but the boat setting, storms, and abandoned ocean liner all point to the title being a reference to the Bermuda Triangle, the site of an urban legend that describes a triangular patch of ocean in the Atlantic as particularly dangerous to those who enter it.

What’s more, Greg’s boat is named Triangle, indicating that perhaps just the ship itself is the site of mysterious and dangerous phenomena, or something more hellish. Between the ocean liner, Greg’s Triangle, and Jess’ home, there are three major sites of time looping, a makeshift Bermuda Triangle, as it were.

How The Sisyphean Time Loop Works In Triangle

The Time Loop Has Rules But They Make Sense

The mechanics of the time loop in Triangle are not all that complicated as far as time travel movie rules are concerned. In this Sisyphean-like time loop, Jess has become trapped after dying, like in the Greek myth. Every time it appears that she will succeed and rescue her son, she is sent back to the beginning with no knowledge of the previous loop. The loop begins with Jess getting on the Triangle. Fate then capsizes their boat and drifts them toward the abandoned ocean liner.

Jess realizes that every time someone but her dies on the ocean liner, a new group of doppelgängers arrives. The loop begins again. This means that while two Gregs can’t be on the boat at the same time, two or more Jesses can. The mysterious person on the bridge, the caller, and the killer in the burlap sack are all versions of Jess from different time loops. When the main story Jess pushes the burlap sack assailant into the ocean, they say, “You have to kill them; it’s the only way to get home.”

What Happens When Jess Gets Off The Boat

The End Of The Film Comes Back To The Beginning

It’s from this line that Jess understands the only way to end the loop is to kill everyone on board. So she dons the burlap sack, kills some version of her friends, and is pushed overboard by another Jess. She wakes up on the shore on the same morning.

Jess goes to her home, rings the doorbell to distract her counterpart, kills the Jess at home, and takes Tommy in the car, believing she’s escaped the loop. However, when Jess hits a seagull as she drives and gets out to move it, she sees dozens of dead seagulls, indicating this is all part of the loop.

Moments later, Jess and Tommy get in a car crash, finally connecting the beginning of the film (though the crash was kept secret from the audience) to the end. Tommy and Jess are killed instantly, and the camera pans to a new Jess watching horrified. A man approaches her and asks if she needs a ride. She asks him to take her to Greg’s boat, now set on escaping the loop. However, when she lies down to nap on the boat she wakes up, and it’s clear she has no recognition of past loops. This has happened countless times before.

How Triangle Compares To Other Time Loop Movies

Its Tragic Nature Sets It Apart

Triangle is a tragedy, which sets it apart from many time-loop movies. When focusing on many time loop movies, such as Groundhog Day or Happy Death Day, the entire purpose of the movie is for the person trapped in the loop to figure out how they can get out. In Groundhog Day, it was all about figuring out what a person was doing wrong in their lives. In Happy Death Day, it was all about finding the killer and stopping the loop by stopping the killer. This movie took things in a horrifying direction.

Much like Happy Death Day, it was about finding the killer, but in this case, the person trapped really didn’t know they were in a time loop until it was far too late, and she realized she was the killer.

However, a movie that is very similar to the format of the time loop in Triangle is the 2007 movie, Time Crimes. The two films are similar in that a man with his face bandaged up attacks Héctor for seemingly no reason, only to learn later that there is a time machine and there is more than one Héctor, and he is the killer and the person tormenting himself. The entire real meaning of Triangle is a little more metaphysical than the sci-fi-based Time Crimes, but both play in the same sandbox.

The Real Meaning Of Triangle’s Ending

Jess Is Being Punished

Triangle can be viewed as a Greek tragedy. Jess is punished for her offense against Tommy by being put into a Sisyphean hell that she cannot escape. In the myth, Sisyphus is a trickster who cheats death multiple times. He is punished by being forced to roll a giant boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it nears the top, repeating the cycle for eternity. Like Sisyphus, Jess’ transgression seems slight for such a brutal punishment, but that’s the way Greek myths go sometimes.

There are many more allusions to Greek myth, including the name of the ocean liner: Aeolus, who is the Greek god of the winds. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his men arrive on the island of Aeolia where Aeolus dwelt. The god gave Odysseus a bag made of oxhide, not too far off from burlap, filled with the winds, which Odysseus and his men used to traverse the seas. Much like Sisyphus, when Odysseus nearly arrives home, he greedily opens the bag and is sent back to the starting point of his journey.

It’s also important to remember that Odysseus, like Jess, is the only one of his crew to survive the journey. At the end of Triangle, after the car crash, Jess is asked by a preternaturally calm man if she needs a ride anywhere. Who is he? Where did he come from? And why is he so willing to help Jess?

This driver could be Charon, the Greek mythological ferryman who brought souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Jess’ wish, “just one day off,” does not seem to please whatever gods inhabit the world of Triangle, and she’s cursed to be eternally punished for it, dragged from each loop by a smiling ferryman.

Triangle

This psychological thriller follows a group of friends stranded on a yacht in the Bermuda Triangle, where they board a passing ship only to experience terrifying temporal distortions and duplications of themselves.

Release Date

October 16, 2009

Cast

Melissa George , Michael Dorman , Rachael Carpani , Henry Nixon , Emma Lung , Liam Hemsworth , Joshua McIvor , Bryan Probets

Runtime

99 Minutes