‘Triangle’ movie ending, explained

Movies with Time loops and time travel can be confusing as hell, and as such, they may require multiple viewings to even begin to understand what’s going on. Films like Looper or Tenet can really boggle the brain and in some cases maybe you’ll even need an explainer to clear up any lingering questions regarding details and plot points. 

You may have found yourself feeling that after watching Triangle. A pretty underappreciated horror-thriller with a time loop twist. If you got to the ending and found yourself scratching your head then read on as we’re going to go through the film’s ending and pick it apart.

To understand the end we first have to know what’s going on at the beginning. It all starts with our protagonist, Jess, comforting her autistic son who seems distressed. We see snippets of her day, including her cleaning up some spilled paint and generally being a good mother. She gets a mysterious knock on the door but when she answers, there’s no one there.

We then see the rest of the film’s characters, Greg, Downey, Sally, and Victor on a boat preparing to set sail. They are later joined by Jess who Victor notices is acting strange after she fails to remember where her son is. Her telling Victor that he’s at school only serves to worry him more (it’s a Saturday).

The boat overturns in a freak storm and the gang ends up being saved by a cruise liner, named after Aeolus, the father of Sisyphus, the Greek who cheated death and was condemned to push a boulder up a mountain forever as punishment. Before they board they spot a shadowy figure watching them. Expecting help, the gang is shocked to find the ship is abandoned.

The time loop twist is revealed

The mysterious figure is actually revealed to be Jess from the future. When our Jess kills future Jess by knocking her overboard, we see past Jess and her past friends alive and well, sitting on the overturned boat just like at the beginning. It turns out our Jess is now the shadowy figure they saw on the ship before boarding.

Of course, just because Jess is the shadowy figure doesn’t mean she’s going to instantly start killing. First, she tries to warn Victor; predictably he doesn’t believe her, and in an effort to make him understand she pushes him against a wall. Unfortunately, there’s a coat hanger nailed into the wall which ends up creating that hole we saw in the back of his head earlier.

So that explains Victor’s injuries from the first loop, but why would Jess kill Greg and the others? Something still doesn’t add up. She ends up in a locker room, she finds a pile of scrunched-up paper on the floor all with the same message “Kill everyone who boards”. To confirm what we already know, she writes out the message herself on another scrap of paper.

Jess also finds a room full of rifles, one of which she takes, but instead of gunning down her friends she confronts her past self before she can accidentally finish Victor off the way she did the last time, (Remember, a wounded Victor found past Jess and attacked before she accidentally killed him in self-defense.) Our Jess manages to stop this by getting to her past self before Victor arrives, essentially stopping Victor from dying.

Jess hears a gunshot come from the theater and, upon arrival Greg is dead and Sally and Downey are doing the exact same thing they did before. So wait; is there another masked killer? Are they also another Jess? That would mean there are somehow three Jesses running around this ship. That’s exactly the case, as it turns out — the time loop has loops within its loops.

Whilst we have a loop every time the whole group apart from Jess dies, each Jess actually lives through three loops (if we include the first when she has no clue what’s going on). This means that there are actually always three versions of Jess on board the ship, but how does this work?

If we look at the future Jess that our Jess knocked overboard as being in the first loop, then this masked shooter Jess is from the second loop, and our Jess is actually from the third loop. Of course, there’s been way more than three loops, but we’re boiling it down to make it understandable. Then we have the current loop, loop four, which isn’t playing out how we saw it with loop three Jess. This will cause loop four of Jess’s path to take a different direction.

Essentially loop three Jess will always try to stop her friends from dying the first time around before understanding what must be done. On the fifth loop, she will finally start killing her friends, becoming the masked killer that her past self knocked overboard near the beginning. 

The Jess from the fourth loop experiences a different series of events. She saw her future self (our Jess) which stopped her from killing Victor. She goes on to kill Jess from the second loop by hacking her to pieces with an axe, rather than just knocking her overboard as our Jess did to her counterpart from the first loop. Fourth Jess will go on to be the Jess that stabs Sally and Downey to death when third Jess was trying to save everyone. However, Fourth Jess always ends up violently killed by her past self and the loop is complete.

So what happens to our Jess?

After falling overboard, the Jess we’ve been following wakes up on the beach and is able to run home. However, When she gets there she sees her past self doing the same things we saw her doing at the beginning. The paint she was cleaning up at the beginning is spilled by her son after he sees our Jess at the window. Seeing a clone of your mom outside the window would probably startle anyone so that’s understandable.

Of course, Jess isn’t the perfect mother we’ve been led to believe as she slaps her son for spilling the paint. Now our Jess decides it’s time to pull a classic Rick and Morty move by killing her past self and taking her place. The only problem is that her son witnesses this and is understandably a bit upset so now our Jess has to comfort him and assure him it was just a bad dream.

Jess puts her own dead body in the trunk and takes her son with her in the car. Along the way, she hits a seagull, which she throws off the side of the road into a pile of dead seagulls. Of course, this just further proves that we are still in a loop. Jess gets back in the car and starts driving but she’s distracted and ends up colliding with a lorry. The crash causes the death of her son as well as the body of herself that Jess murdered to be thrown out onto the road. 

Our Jess is miraculously fine though. A taxi driver notices her and offers her a lift, which she accepts, asking him to drive her to the harbor. She gets out and is approached by Victor who asks where her son is, only now we know why she’s behaving so strangely. Presumably, the loops are about to start all over again.

But what does it all mean?

Remember that little nod to Sisyphus earlier in the film? Well, that wasn’t a meaningless bit of trivia, his eternal, repetitive struggle sounds pretty similar to what Jess has to endure. She is forever doomed to repeat the same time loop forever, making the same mistakes again and again.

But why is this happening to Jess? The most likely explanation for that is that Jess is dead. She probably died in that car accident with her son and the lorry and never actually made it to the harbor. Perhaps it’s the afterlife or maybe it’s all happening in Jess’s mind, either way, the events shown seem to be a manifestation of her guilt at causing the death of her son.

So Jess is dead, but she refuses to move on to the afterlife because of her guilt. The taxi driver who offers to take her to the harbor could be a representation of death, guiding souls to the afterlife. Jess promises him she’ll come back, but breaks that promise, the same way Sisyphus did. Because of this, the eternal time loops are her punishment. Her refusal to accept her and her son’s death means that she’ll forever be trapped within the time loops, the same way Sisyphus will forever be pushing that boulder up the mountain.