The Sci-Fi Horror Movie Ending and Time Loop Explained

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

Jess’s struggle with the daily difficulties of caring for a son with autism is thrown into relief in the film’s plot, which threatens to never free Jess, forcing her to relive traumatic experience after traumatic experience. The audience follows Jess’ struggle to escape the circuit and return home safely. With some unique mythological parallels combined with a modern take on time travel, sin and punishment, Triangle offers a truly compelling story. But it does so in an open-ended way that may leave some audience members scratching their heads without watching it multiple times.

What happens in the triangle

Jess is caught up in a never-ending time loop

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

Noticeably, Tommy is not there. Even stranger is that Jess seems unfazed. 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 begs to help lower mood. A sudden storm blows and capsizes the sailboat. They drift to a floating ocean liner and board after seeing someone on the bridge, but find the boat deserted, although covered in blood. Soon the group begins to die mysteriously with some blaming Jess and others a masked attacker.

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

Jess kills the lookalike, takes Tommy and is in a car accident that kills mother and son. The scene pans away from the wreckage to show another Jess looking on in disbelief before returning to the boat and her friends to begin the cycle again. Triangle It’s not an easy story to explain beat by beattherefore, a deeper examination of the mechanics and symbolism of the time loop is necessary to understand the film.

Life before the start of the triangle

The time loop doesn’t start until a few scenes into the movie

The true story of Triangle starts before the movie. Jess is presumably a single mother of a son with autism. The challenges that come with raising a child with autism have left Jess tense, and the film begins with Jess expressing this frustration in an unhappy way by berating him. While it may not be fair to judge Jess this morning, Triangle is not interested in fairly punishing its protagonist and instead uses this incident as justification for the ordeal his character is about to go through. After all, it is a horror film.

Jess wishes”just a day off“to take care of Tommy and her wish is cruelly granted. After this fight, Jess takes her son in the car to go boating with Greg and his friends. They never make it. Jess gets into a car accident and she and Tommy die.

Just before the accident, as shown at the end of the film, Jess sees a seagull, a marching band named after the ocean cruiser she encounters, and hears the band playing “Anchors Aweigh”, all allusions to what happens at sea. It is after this accident that the time cycle begins for Jess. Whether this is punishment for her behavior towards Tommy, being somewhat guilty about his death, wishing she could have a day away from him, or some other past transgression is never revealed.

Why is the film called Triangle?

The title has a significant meaning

The setting of the time loop is Greg’s boat. Repeatedly, Jess gets into Greg’s boat, turns around, and floats to the abandoned ocean liner. This is where the film’s title becomes fundamental. Triangle could have some meanings, but the scene of the boat, the storms and the abandoned ocean liner point to the title being a reference to the Bermuda Trianglesite of an urban legend that describes a triangular patch of ocean in the Atlantic as particularly dangerous to anyone who enters it.

What’s more, the name of Greg’s boat Triangleindicating that perhaps just the ship itself is the site of mysterious and dangerous phenomena, or something more hellish. Between the ocean liner, Greg Triangleand Jess’s house, there are three main time looping locations, a makeshift Bermuda Triangle, so to speak.

How the Sisyphus time loop works in the triangle

The time loop has rules, but they make sense

The mechanics of the time loop in Triangle aren’t that complicated when it comes to the rules of time travel movies. In this Sisyphus-like time loop, Jess was trapped after dying, like in Greek myth. Every time it seems like she will succeed and rescue her son, she is sent back to the beginning unaware of the previous cycle. The loop begins with Jess entering the Triangle. Fate then turns the boat and takes them towards the abandoned ocean liner.

Jess notices that every time someone besides her dies on the ocean liner, a new group of doppelgängers arrives. The loop starts again. This means that although two Gregs cannot 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 bag are all versions of Jess from different time loops. When in the main story, Jess pushes the burlap bag attacker into the ocean, they say, “You have to kill them; It’s the only way to get home.”

What happens when Jess leaves the boat

The end of the film returns to the beginning

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

Jess goes to her house, ring the bell to distract your counterpartkills Jess at home and takes Tommy in the car, believing she escaped the circuit. However, when Jess hits a seagull while driving and goes out to move it, she sees dozens of dead seagulls, indicating that this is all part of the circuit.

Moments later, Jess and Tommy are in a car accident, finally connecting the beginning of the film (although the accident was kept secret from the public) with the end. Tommy and Jess die instantly, and the camera shows a new Jess watching in horror. A man approaches her and asks if she needs a ride. She asks him to take her to Greg’s boat, now determined to escape the circuit. However, when she lies down to take a nap on the boat, she wakes up and it is clear that it does not recognize the previous loops. This has happened countless times before.

How Triangle Compares to Other Time Loop Movies

His tragic nature sets him apart

Triangle it’s a tragedy, which sets it apart from many time loop films. When focusing on many time loop films such as Groundhog Day or Happy death dayThe whole point of the film is for the person stuck in the loop to figure out how they can get out. In Groundhog Dayit was about finding out what a person was doing wrong in their lives. In Happy death dayit was about finding the killer and breaking the cycle by stopping the killer. This movie took things in a horrible direction.

Very similar Happy death dayit was about finding the killer, but in this case, the trapped person actually didn’t know they were in a time loop until it was too late, and they realized they were the killer.

However, a film that is very similar to the time loop format in Triangle is the 2007 film, Temporal Crimes. The two films are similar in the sense that a man with a bandaged face attacks Héctor for no apparent reason, only to later discover that there is a time machine and that there is more than one Héctor, and he is the killer and the person who torments. All the true meaning of Triangle is a little more metaphysical than the science fiction based Temporal Crimesbut they both play in the same sandbox.

The true meaning of the end of the triangle

Jess is being punished

Triangle It can be seen as a Greek tragedy. Jess is punished for her offense against Tommy by being placed in a Sisyphean hell from which she cannot escape. In myth, Sisyphus is a trickster who cheats death several times. He is punished by being forced to roll a giant boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down every time he approaches the top, repeating the cycle for eternity. Like Sisyphus, Jess’ transgression seems light for such brutal punishmentbut sometimes that’s how Greek myths work.

There are many other allusions to Greek myth, including the name of the ocean liner: Aeolus, who is the Greek god of winds. In Homer OdysseyOdysseus and his men arrive on the island of Aeolia, where Aeolus lived. The god gave Odysseus a bag made of oxhide, not far from burlap, full of winds, which Odysseus and his men used to cross the seas. Just like Sisyphus, when Odysseus almost reaches home, he eagerly opens the bag and is sent back to the starting point of his journey.

It is also important to remember that Odysseus, like Jess, is the only one of his crew to survive the journey. At the end of TriangleAfter the car accident, a preternaturally calm man asks Jess if she needs a ride somewhere. Who is he? Where did he come from? And why is he so willing to help Jess?

This driver could be Charon, the mythological Greek boatman who brought souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Jess’s wish,”just a day off“, does not seem to please any gods who inhabit the world of Triangleand she is cursed to be eternally punished for it, dragged at every turn by a smiling boatman.

How the ending of the movie Triangle was received

Fans were divided over the complex and mythical endings

Critics seemed to love the film, giving it a Certified Fresh 78% Rotten Tomatoes scorewhile the audience was slightly lower, with 66% fresh products. In his critique of Empire Magazinecritic William Thomas wrote that the ending was part of the reason for its positive review. He wrote: “A satisfying puzzler with an unexpectedly moving payoff. You’ll see where it’s going early on, but it still has some shocks in store for the final act.“

As for audiences, the mostly positive reviews praised the story, while there were some who complained about the time loop plot, with one reviewer saying that “drives me crazy.“However, another called Triangle:

“A very clever psychological thriller, full of countless twists and turns that keep the viewer guessing from one scenario to the next. After 15 years, the title is literally moving from beginning to middle to end and, again, all the pieces of the puzzle -mysterious head come along.”

On Redditthere was a whole thread started by someone who couldn’t figure out what Triangle end was trying to say. One of the most interesting comments came from Redditor External Tangentswho wrote that it is not a science fiction film with a time loop. “As the cycle is a mythological punishment, there is no “first cycle” and there is no “first time” they appear on the cruise. There is no bootstrap paradox because it is a time loop specifically created by the afterlife to punish you.R.”