Unheroic Trio
By Chloe Lizotte
The Shipwrecked Triptych
Dir. Deniz Eroglu, Netherlands/Germany/Denmark, no distributor
The Shipwrecked Triptych screens March 15 as part of First Look 2025 at Museum of the Moving Image.
Narrative segmentation has been particularly trendy in recent cinema. Consider this sample set of films released after 2020: Nicolás Pereda’s Fauna (2020), Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (2021), Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021), Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2022), Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (2023), Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides (2024), and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness (2024). Some of these films are reminiscent of short story collections, building on the tradition of the narrative anthology film; Jia and Jude crossfade narrative with nonfiction; and Pereda in particular playfully evokes Hong Sang-soo’s dedication to narrative doubling and repetition compulsion. For many emerging filmmakers, there’s also the influential long shadow of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s dreamlike bifurcation, as well as the strong influence of Eduardo Williams’s three-part network narrative The Human Surge (2016).
The best recent examples feel less like puzzle boxes to solve, more like living, breathing worlds with no single dominant perspective. This might also reinforce a postmodern skepticism of omniscient, unifying, godlike narration. So it’s intriguing that the title of Deniz Eroglu’s feature debut, The Shipwrecked Triptych (2025), calls back to Hieronymus Bosch, whose triptychs were displayed on altars or in devotional settings; the viewer of The Garden of Earthly Delights observes a progression from Eden to temptation to paradise lost. Eroglu’s film is a response to Bosch’s Ship of Fools, one part of a triptych on the seven deadly sins (this part dramatizes gluttony; general merrymaking and imbibing ensue on a clown-car-sized, rapidly sinking boat). But moralistic readings of Bosch’s art fail to account for his proto-surrealist imagination, as evinced by his demons and his flair for ensemble chaos—his warnings are seductively entwined with the notion that hell dwells within us all.
When compressed to a dry-sounding logline, The Shipwrecked Triptych is an anthology film about postwar German cultural identity and social exclusion; Eroglu is Danish-Turkish and was educated in Frankfurt, which frames his perspective on the country. But the film is not a history lesson. Instead, it’s about a wide range of irreducibly complex people prone to leaps of faith and temptation, and driven by murky, often bizarre motivations. As suggested by its pleasant tongue-twister of a title, the film is cleaved into three 30-minute episodes: the first is set on New Year’s Eve in a nursing home in the early ’80s; the second takes place in the ’90s, exploring racial tensions post-reunification; and the final third catapults us back to a medieval band of outsiders in 1505, Boschian times. The first segment of Shipwrecked Triptych debuted in a gallery setting—Eroglu’s background is in interdisciplinary installation art. On a practical level, it’s possible that anthology structures are currently popular since they are friendlier to piecemeal funding opportunities, allowing a feature-length statement to emerge from grants for multiple shorts. Shipwrecked Triptych can work in both contexts, but it benefits from focused, start-to-finish cinema viewing; when accumulating characters, the true pleasure is the gestalt.
Across all three segments, we hear the recurring phrase, “You don’t know what suffering is.” In the first part, it’s spoken by a nursing home resident as he’s put to bed, railing that he was once a respected professor and intellectual and now finds himself infantilized in the twilight of his life. This nursing home is all drab beiges and concrete brutalist exteriors, but the title of the film and the home’s ugly carpeting converge to suggest a claustrophobic, musty cruise ship—Nicolas C. Geissler's camera often conjures the feeling of a rocking boat, as if the world onscreen might plunge into the depths at any moment.
Set in West Germany in 1982, this segment sits on the precipice between old and new generations. But the older residents are not reflective. More deadpan than decrepit, they’re passive in the face of their own mortality. The young, all-male staff at the home are planning to put the residents to bed early to throw a New Year’s Eve dinner party, but their penchant for mischief-making barely manages to cut through the stagnant setting and color tone. Even at their bacchanal, the food looks like neutral-toned slop, piling on the mashed potatoes, caviar, and fish. Same-sex flirtation ensues, but there’s also an undercurrent of threat to any passion here—one of the workers has just traveled from New York, and we hear radio reports of HIV beginning to spread there. But if this is our primary impression of the new generation, the group also pointedly snickers at non-German characters’ dietary restrictions, sidelining one worker, Mustafa, from the gathering as the cleaner. (Eroglu taps an earlier touchstone of West German cultural critique by modeling Mustafa’s costume on the blue-and-brown clothing palette from Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974.)
In languid cross-dissolves, Eroglu drifts between this dinner and the one non-octogenarian resident of the home, a young woman whom, we gather, suffered a breakdown while grieving the loss of her mother. As the men party on obliviously, she walks out of the home and down the frigid path into the woods, where at midnight, she finds herself beneath spectacular fireworks. Eroglu frames them from her point of view as though they’re bursts from heaven, matched by her beatific reaction shots. The story ends the morning after—there’s a crude turd on the floor, and all the workers are nude, asleep on couches; the man in from New York stares warily at his presumed conquest. Meanwhile, we find the young woman frozen to death outside, torrents of tears eerily frozen over: a desperation for divine meaning up against the certainty of death.
The pull of the woods evokes German Romanticism, and Eroglu peppers the remaining two thirds of the film with sweeping, Friedrich-esque landscape shots. That art historical movement, for its emphasis on the uniqueness of German emotional and philosophical character, has a troubling link to the rise in ethnic nationalism that led to the Weimar period. This specter hangs over the second part of Triptych, which begins with a sweaty, Teutonic-looking man awakening from a slumber in his car, parked in the middle of an open field. After he drives away, we cut to a binocular-eye-view of a Congolese family milling around outside their house. This section of the film was shot in 35mm but transferred to VHS, an aesthetic cue which, coupled with the surveillance gaze, puts us in the land of Michael Haneke—though the narrative of cross-cultural tensions that follows evokes his French films as much as than his German ones.
This creep knocks on the family’s door and introduces himself as Herr Fromm, here to check on their young children on behalf of social services, despite showing up on a Saturday and failing to produce identification. The parents—guarded due to the suspicious circumstances of his arrival, but unwilling to see what this erratic presence might do if they don’t cooperate—let him in. Fromm greets the two-and-a-half-year-old twins in sinister fashion (“two identical galaxies”) then pokes around their house in all manner of inappropriate ways, even stopping to take a shower, emerging drenched and beet-red. Most memorably, he gets down on all fours to start cutting the grass in the backyard with household scissors, gazing like a demon up at the father, Eli, insisting that he needs to “tame” the environment: “It’s difficult to control the Congo, but this you can control very well.” (In the thickets, he also crouches by the vine to bite a strawberry, a prominent fruit in The Garden of Earthly Delights.)
Fromm could be anybody—an ex-Nazi, reassimilated. His backstory is opaque enough that he broadly embodies German ethnic nationalism and cultural history. He coughs up the name “Hölderlin” at dinner compulsively, while encouraging the toddlers to start reading their German history; earlier, he dances with a garden hoe in the backyard to the music of Händel in his head. The odd tenor of his visit gives this segment its particular power: he represents the threat of erratic, unannounced state surveillance, probing and violent even if there’s no “clear” transgressive incident. At one point, Fromm claps Eli on the shoulder and assures him that Germany is “really here” for him if he has big problems, despite what he may have heard to the contrary. In the immediate wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when this chapter is set, there were several incidents of racist violence against migrants, a reactionary moment of German national identity in crisis. In the end, Fromm is the character who insists the others don’t know suffering. After announcing he’d like to sleep in the couple’s bed, Fromm clings to their bedpost as Eli tries to pry him from the room. The bedpost snaps, and Fromm flees the house with it in hand—clutching the remnants of a wreck before being washed out to sea, the old order in obsolescence.
The triptych is completed with a dialogue-free segment emulating silent cinema, set in 1505: the establishing landscapes keep us in the German countryside, but the first figures we see are a small band of medieval characters carrying a makeshift cross, a seeming swerve to Bergman and Dreyer. This marks a departure from the preceding sections’ potent ensemble tensions, a transition which ultimately keeps the film looser and a little more fun, if at the expense of delving deeper into the postwar German context. Our focal point here is a group of social outcasts and disabled individuals who make their living reading fortunes (though, one of them tells a prospective buyer in an intertitle, “I don’t know anything; I’m just here”). They seem at their happiest in another party scene—a bonfire dance set to anachronistic electro from Thomas Franklin Huus—but corporeal release only provides temporary salvation, however alternative one’s social group might appear to be. Case in point, a man with a bowl cut is banished by the group’s leader for sleeping with one of the women at the end of the party. He sets off—where else?—into the forest, where he’s aggressively pursued by a woodsman. At the end of the film, thanks to some shapeshifting effects, he is revealed to be our most Boschian character—and the one with a claim to suffering this time around, with shades of eternity.
The woods actually appear to creak and breathe as if alive throughout this section: fantastical computer-generated tentacles jut up like phalluses from the ground, bespeaking a certain primitive, of-the-earth horniness. Primal urges in Eroglu’s vision of Germany are troubled, but with this final pivot, he offers a touching faith—not in divinity, but in the certainty of time passing through biblical cycles of destruction and renewal. The film exudes a humanistic affection for the outcasts and the persecuted, and a desire to turn the system on its head. In fact, the movie begins with a gesture that ironically upends the stereotypical order: a Black character in a position of power asks a white worker with a gleeful sneer, “Aren’t you a German?”