I take comfort in dark comedy. On the evening of 9/11, I grabbed a pizza from Papa John’s and watched Dr. Strangelove. When I used to “dog it” on the reg, my most enjoyable Greyhound ride was a college-reunion trip from Chicago to Athens, Georgia, mainly because a bartending colleague suggested I read Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South. I’ve experienced some turbulence in my love life these last few years, which has made me even more vocal about my fondness for Żuławski’s Possession. Life is fatal, and fatalism, while not always practical, can be funny. When my depression gets deadly, grim satire sometimes keeps me going.

Triangle of Sadness, the English-language debut and latest bleak-comedic minefield from Swedish director Ruben Östlund, is more coherent than Possession, but that ain’t saying much. Whiplash makes the minutes go faster, and the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime is offset by its unapologetic gear-shifting. It jumps from: 

• a deadly-cynical satire of the fashion industry (which has been done almost to death, at least the way snarky cishet white guys tend to do it, but is done with unique, ever-so-European observational wit here), to 
• some low-key relationship horror, to 
• broad class-warrior caricature delivered through shamelessly Altmanesque cafeteria scenes, to
• a very long and detailed ballet of gross-out comedy that makes the Farrelly Brothers look like Martin and Lewis, to
• a hybrid of Survivor and the Stanford Prison Experiment with a dash of ambiguously consensual sex-slavery

Despite packing at least five distinct stories into one sprawling odyssey of a film, Triangle of Sadness has some consistency. Its dialogue is brutally cynical throughout, and the anguished, Lynchian rictuses of its characters give it a thrilling sense of nightmarish awkwardness. 

It also has its obsessions. It film dwells contemplatively on:

• The phrase “everyone is equal”
• The phrase “in den Wolken”
• The difference between populist “smiley brands” and high-end “grumpy brands”
• The raging cognitive dissonance of libertarians who get rich selling hand grenades
• The savory deliciousness of pretzel sticks in specific contexts
• The aforementioned gross-out sequence, which is not unlike an old-fashioned pie-fight scene, but with bodily functions in lieu of pie-throwing

There’s even some character development. The toxic relationship dynamics of the Instagram power couple Yaya (Charibi Dean Kriek) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) are brilliantly paced and heartachingly well-drawn. One sad-sack gazillionaire character behaves roughly the way one would expect from a guy who goes from popping bottles with models to bare-handed killing, but his arc is one of the most compelling and humanized manifestations of the film’s pervasive eat-the-rich theme. Woody Harrelson and Zlatko Burić are delightfully hyperverbal as an American Marxist and a Russian Reaganite who become chaos-goblin drinking buddies. As dark as it gets, Triangle of Sadness has a heart, and that heart lives in the depth of the characters.

That makes it somewhat believable when Östlund insists that he thinks humans are good, actually. And it makes Triangle of Sadness more than a pure distillation of the scorched-earth satire of cinema’s reigning post-capitalist Terry Southern. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re feeling misanthropic and miserable—remember, it’s only temporary, feelings die, too!—you’ll find a lot to love, and it may even cheer you up.

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