When my buddy Rickey recommended Triangle to me, he didn’t really say anything about it, he just handed it to me and said he thought I’d like it. I tossed it on the to watch pile which, up until last night also included Monster High. I’m going to try and avoid spoilers in this review, but going in not knowing anything was probably the best way to go. So, if you’ve come to trust my opinion on horror flicks, I do recommend checking this movie out. It’s not the best horror movie I’ve seen in a long time, but it’s a good flick. If that’s enough, stop reading here and go rent Triangle. If not, read on.

The movie follows a group of friends (really most of them are newly acquainted) who go out for some sailing fun only to find their boat sinking after a freak storm comes. They luck out and a big, old cruise ship comes chugging along close enough for them to hop from their overturned boat to the ship. Great news, right? Well it seems like the boat is empty…except for the slasher-like person seemingly hunting them down (you can see the visage in the blood on the poster).

Okay, I want to call this SPOILER TERRITORY because any further details kind of take away from the surprise of the movie. The main character played my Alias’ Melissa George–who has been acting weird and spacey the whole time–discovers that she’s in some kind of time loop on the ship. She starts seeing herself at different points in the timeline. For the most part, though, we see her on one linear timeline that happens to see her friends and herself getting on the boat several times. As you might expect, with this plot and that oddly-shaped mask of the killer, the movie reminded me of Timecrimes, but I liked Triangle WAY better. Anyway, the thing that this movie does differently, which leads to even more headaches when trying to really figure it out, is amassing corpses and other elements from the timeloops. Let me try to explain. In one scene, George drops her locket down a drain, but it lands on a huge pile of the exact same necklace. There’s another scene with one of her acquaintances crawling to her death amongst a huge pile of her own corpses.

For the record, I’m still talking SPOILERS, even more so because I’m getting to the end of the movie. I felt like I was understanding things to an extent. George has gone through this loop in the timeline we see several times, but it also seems like she’s trapped in the loop. Just look at all the bodies and necklaces right? That’s all confirmed in the end where she gets back to her house earlier the day she left, kills her previous self for being mean to her (their?) son and then dying in a car accident only to have a new version of her appear at the accident ready to get in a cab and go to the dock to get on the boat. Getting on the boat will potentially allow her to come back again earlier that day so she can keep her son from dying. So there are a few main questions. First, does this new version know as little as the previous incarnation? The first time around (as far as we viewers are concerned) she keeps have deja vu, but maybe every time she goes through this larger loop, she remembers a little bit more? The other, larger question we’re left with is “Why?” Is she being punished for being mean to her son or has she done something much worse? Is she the unwitting of a Twilight Zone-like catch in reality? Of course, the movie doesn’t answer the bigger questions, which is fine. I like having something to think about.

Okay, we’re finally done with the spoilers. Like I said above, I do recommend checking the movie out. The cast is solid and, even though the beginning’s filled with question marks and melodrama, overall I dug the story.  I was shocked I liked it mostly because of the presentation of the DVD which has a lenticular cover. If and when you do watch the movie, I will say this: pay attention during the opening credits, even to the mundane stuff. If I wasn’t so tired when I finished the flick at 2:30AM last night, I would consider watching it again directly afterwards. Instead, I watched just the beginning again this morning and it’s really clever how the whole thing is put together. Definitely check Triangle out, it’s a gem floating in a sea of DTV crap that will likely get passed over for looking like all the other crap on the surface.