Triangle (4½ Stars)

Have you ever woken up from a dream and found that after waking up you were still dreaming? So you wake up again, and you find you're still dreaming. Not just a dream within a dream within a dream, but it's always the same dream.

"Triangle" is a three-point film in more ways than one. It's an Australian film with a British director set in America. The Australian actors speak with plausible American accents, to my ears at least. Maybe an American is a better judge.

Jess, played by Melissa George, is a single mother with an autistic son. She goes on a sailing trip with some friends, leaving her son behind. He's at school, she says, although it's a Saturday. They sail from the harbour, and their ship is overturned by a freak storm. They manage to climb onto a passing ocean liner. But it's deserted. The only other person on board is a masked gunman who's shooting the friends one by one, until only Jess is left.

A typical horror story, you say? This is where the twists start. Jess battles with the gunman (who we then find out is a woman). Jess overpowers the masked women and is about to kill her, when the woman warns Jess that the only way to save her friends is to kill them all. Jess pushes the woman overboard, after which she sees her friends, including herself, boarding the ship. She watches them in secret and realises that time is repeating itself. But she is also being watched by a third version of herself who is preparing to kill the friends.

The film grows more and more fascinating as it continues. The time loops are even more complex than Jess imagined, starting before she even left her house in the morning. Jess attempts to break the loop, but everything she does makes her follow the same path as her former selves.

While I enjoy this film greatly, and feel tempted to give it a full 5 stars, I have to accuse it of plagiarism. I don't mind it borrowing the scene of a character ringing his own doorbell from "Lost Highway". Or the references to "The Shining", such as the dead body in room 237. The problem is that the film doesn't just borrow scenes from "Timecrimes", made two years earlier, it copies whole plotlines. Director Christopher Smith denies imitating "Timecrimes", but this is just as impossible to believe as when Joss Whedon denied that he was imitating David Lynch films in "Restless", the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season four. If Smith had made "Triangle" in film school he would have been failed for plagiarism, but this isn't school, it's the real world. The film stands on its own merits. And it's definitely worth watching.

Click here to view the trailer.