The last few months have seen a surge in films with class warfare at their core. The successive releases of Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Glass Onion, and Infinity Pool — along with the breakout success of the second season of The White Lotus* — have demonstrated that our wealthy overlords and their cruises to nowhere, forbidden tasting menus and pandemic-free getaways are perfect targets for fictional scorn, even in the dying days of satire.

Of those films, a couple missed the mark and left me cold in different ways, while the ones that embraced and explored genre tropes were more effective.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix) ostensibly the most purely entertaining of these offerings, served up a purely superficial comment on the ruling class. Setting aside the improbability of a central friend group that spans tech, politics, fashion and the dead-end cultural meeting point of video games and men’s rights, the satire is basically limited to how the rich no-sold the pandemic with sheer masks. Making things worse, the film’s big surprise — that the tech genius at its center is actually the dumbest person alive — became less of an a-ha and more of oh-duh with each passing day on Elon Musk’s Twitter. Aside from a few camera and cut flourishes, Glass Onion is a tepid mystery lacking the charm of the first film (itself way overpraised for delivering genre charms) was the latest entry in Netflix’s catalog of uncanny-valley films that feel slack in all the wrong places. 

Even longer, louder and more obvious than Glass Onion is Triangle of Sadness (VOD), a film so didactic that a capitalist Russian oligarch and a communist American captain drunkenly argue politics over a cruise ship’s intercom while its seasick passengers are literally awash in shit and puke during a particularly gnarly storm. The bodily fluids are more compelling than the dialogue, but you’ve got to go big or go home in a year where Jackass Forever and Babylon really went for it. After an undercooked first act and an overdone second, Triangle turns into Lord of the Flies, as a pirate attack capsizes not just the cruise ship but the social order, putting a cleaning woman in charge — only to see her reproduce the same bodily dominance of the previous ruling class. After nearly two and a half hours of hectoring, a boulder to head seems like mercy.

On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed The Menu (HBO Max) and how it used genre tools to dismantle the master’s kitchen. Beginning with a sharp if familiar satire of the absurd state of haute cuisine, “The Menu” kept ramping up the stakes, like cooking a frog in a pot of boiling water. Here the uber rich continue to dine despite severed fingers and suicides, and the film’s biggest target — Nicholas Hoult’s clueless food obsessive — is revealed as not only ready to die for the meal but perfectly fine bringing a sex worker along with him. The Menu is literally a class conflict, between the servants and the served, whose crimes run the gamut from financial to fidelitous, from wasting someone’s day with a bad movie (ha!) to going to an Ivy with no student loans. With life-or-death stakes, the real test of a film like this is whether or not it sticks the landing, which — sentimental Final Girl moment aside — I think it did, in a glorious blaze that will make you reconsider the s’more. 

The Menu suggests a lecture is much more palatable as horror, an argument settled by the best-in-class of class warfare, Infinity Pool (PVOD). Brandon Cronenberg’s follow-up to the underappreciated Possessor takes the most dangerous game to its logical endpoint and demonstrates how capricious and careless the ruling class is with the lives of others. 

As with The Menu, Infinity Pool aims its satirical lens on the familiar before ratcheting up the action. James (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife are vacationing in a fictional otherplace at a resort built around a fake town where the totems of local heritage — in the form of grotesque masks that resemble rotting flesh and broken bones — are available at the gift shop. The film has some fun with the uncomfortable moments of polite society and the gaps between interloping strivers and international scions before a fatal drive down a lost highway shows how those polite masks slip when the rich actually have to deal with the “animals” just outside their razor wire fences.

The film’s central conceit — that the country allows the super-rich to pay to have clones created and punished for their crimes — is a fascinating storytelling device, like a time loop, that allows Cronenberg and company to explore philosophical questions without the shackles of reality. It also helps that the traditional story beats that this kind of device and plot present — Which is the “real” James? Has he lost his passport on purpose to extend his stay at this peculiar playground? Will the villains get away unscathed? — are so obvious that the viewer can fixate on the more compelling ideas below the surface (and let the film’s phantasmagorical flourishes wash over them).

The creation and execution of James’ (first) double shows off Cronenberg’s flare for body horror, both quotidian and baroque: from the poking and prodding of a prison medical process to the ritualistic, almost primeval stabbing that releases rivers of blood that pools in the straw below. Thankfully, the science of doubling is handwaved and replaced with a psychedelic, kaleidoscopic collage — a motif that returns at other moments of delirium.

James soon falls in with Gabi (Mia Goth) and fellow “zombies” that have survived the country’s justice system and emerged invigorated by the experience — a privilege their money couldn’t buy elsewhere. Unmoored by consequences, the crew embarks on a bacchanalia of booze, guns, sex and murder, embracing their new flesh and donning the folk art masks. 

After each death-rebirth, the participant receives their clone’s cremains in an urn, and the piling up of the urns as “souvenirs” of this perverse amusement ride is a sick joke that makes it clear: they’re going back on this ride as often as they can. Soon enough the waiting before the cloning is just another banal inconvenience, the small price of real freedom. 

For James and his new friends, abusing the justice system is the epitome of upper class cultural tourism, no different from the multicultural dining experiences and Indian Bollywood dancing at the resort — another culture reduced to parody by globalism.

Eventually, the big joke is revealed: there’s always someone higher on the food chain. James married rich, after all: this isn’t really his world and he’s been punching above his weight, a class tourist. Even when he survives his transition from hunter to prey, he can’t return to the leisure-class inanity of Gabi and her friends. He is irrevocably ruined, left to wait out the rainy season alone and learn that there’s no ethical clone punishment under capitalism.

* I’ll leave aside The White Lotus, which — despite taking a giant leap forward in its second season thanks to more compelling characters and less small-screen-bound filmmaking — is still TV, no matter what HBO says.

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