The film is told in three parts, and the trailer I saw did not hint at the third part, which I am very grateful for. I would recommend going into this movie knowing as little as possible, though honestly, you’ll probably love it either way. In fact, the trailer I saw did give away a large part of the sequence that had me cry-laughing in my seat, and while I didn’t think it was that funny in the trailer, it was spectacularly silly in the final film.
Part One opens with a couple called Carl and Yaya (the incredibly beautiful Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean), who are fashion models and influencers. They have a rich lifestyle whilst not actually being rich themselves and the first act of the film involves an incredibly heated argument about money that sets the stage for the rest of this searing satire.
In Part Two, we get to the yacht. A bunch of rich people are enjoying a vacation on a luxury yacht and here we get an interesting stratification of class. There are the guests who are uber-wealthy Europeans, who have made their money through all manner of enterprises (many of them slightly unsavory), and who often behave like spoiled brats or clueless morons. There are the staff who have been taught to be obsequious and make sure their wealthy clientele are always having a fantastic time so that they get a massive tip at the end. Even among the staff, there’s a further class delineation between the upper deck, client-facing folk, who are mostly white, and the below-deck cleaning staff and mechanics who are mostly Filipino. No spoilers, but that delineation is going to bear delicious fruit in Part Three of this film.
Carl and Yaya oddly straddle these classes. For all intents and purposes, they are viewed as the wealthy clientele. They are two beautiful people on board this yacht, they probably don’t have a care in the world, right? But they were just gifted this trip as part of their social media hustle - they are somewhat bewildered by the other rich guests they meet in the dining room every night, but are also weird and prickly around the staff, never quite knowing how to fit into either world as they have such an ambiguous sense of their current status and a tenuous grasp of their finances. Again, the amorphous nature of their existence will become important in Part Three. And lest I forget, we also have Woody Harrelson as the yacht’s very alcoholic captain, a man who is a raving socialist, hates to deal with the rich people on board, and who will ultimately preside over the utmost chaos that plagues this yacht on a rocky night.
Writer-director Ruben Ostlund takes his time establishing his main characters before he lets the farce run free and this movie is an impeccable takedown of wealth and privilege. The editing is deliberate, and while I initially worried it might be too slow-paced, I quickly discovered that Ostlund allowed for all these pauses in conversations and an unsettling vibe at the beginning in order to set you up for the frenetic satire that is about to follow. You're in the hands of a master, just give yourself up to the ride.
That’s all I’m giving you. You must seek this movie out, ideally in a movie theater where you can enjoy it with a raucous audience who experiences a frisson of schadenfreude when the rich start to suffer and the yacht trip goes awry. This movie is such a blistering indictment of our society and how we talk about money and how we treat those who have it and those who don’t. And despite that serious theme, it is the funniest thing I have watched in a long while, a sizzling example of the power of satire to both educate and entertain. It is an absolute marvel and if I could make one wish, it would be for Dolly de Leon to get a nod for Best Supporting Actress at Oscar time because her performance absolutely thrilled me to my bones. My God. What a movie.
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