147 min | R | October 7, 2022 | Neon
Two influencers board a luxury yacht full of the obscenely rich. A storm hits during the captain’s dinner, and the natural order starts coming up the way it went down. Ruben Östlund hates these people, and he wants you to know it.
Carl and Yaya are models and influencers who fight over a dinner check and then get invited on a luxury yacht cruise for the rich. The film splits into three parts. It moves from the world of fashion to the floating palace of the ultra-wealthy and then to a place where the old hierarchy collapses. Ruben Östlund builds the whole thing to make one argument. Money buys status, and status is a performance that only holds as long as the systems propping it up keep running.
Harris Dickinson plays Carl with a wounded vanity that curdles into resentment. He is a man who trades on his looks and knows the clock is running. Charlbi Dean plays Yaya as someone who treats charm as currency and never stops calculating the exchange rate. Woody Harrelson plays the Captain as a drunk Marxist who quotes ideology over the intercom while his ship goes to hell. Dolly de Leon plays Abigail, the toilet manager who becomes essential when survival depends on skills the rich do not have. She works the shift from invisible servant to ruler with quiet menace, and she takes the film away from everyone around her.
Östlund writes and directs with a satirist’s appetite for discomfort. He holds shots past the point of comfort and lets scenes run until the audience squirms. The centerpiece is a captain’s dinner staged during a violent storm, and the camera sits with the seasick passengers as fine dining turns into a flood of vomit and worse. The production design draws a hard line between the gleaming white surfaces of wealth and the grime beneath them. The sound work in that sequence does as much as the images, layering retching and groaning over the ship’s creak until the whole vessel feels like a body breaking down.
Östlund makes his points early and then keeps making them. The targets are easy and the film knows it, swinging at influencers and oligarchs and yacht passengers who never had a chance to be more than types. The third act sharpens when Abigail takes control because power changes hands rather than simply getting mocked. The film wants to indict the whole machine of class, and it lands the blow without ever surprising you about where the blow is coming from.