GRIMMFEST 2020: Triggered
grimmfestAlastair Orr’s Triggered follows a recent trend of ‘concept-horror’ cinema. An entertaining idea for a premise, completely blindsided by a lack of maturity and self-awareness by the writers, and a total deprivation of relatability from the characters. That all really should have been obvious, given the title of the film. But nonetheless, following on from films such as Battle Royale (2000), Saw (2004), and The Belko Experiment (2016), Triggered places itself firmly below the best of the genre in that regard. Nine friends reunite to reminisce their high school days on a camping trip. Only, they didn’t organise it: Their disgruntled ex-science teacher did and he blames them all for his son's death. With each strapped with a suicide bomb and a timer, secrets are revealed, and friendships capitulate, as they fight to be the sole survivor come the end of the game.
It’s an altogether embarrassing experience. Not just within the terrible performances, but the script itself is an insult. At one stage, a character coming out as bisexual is used as a punchline. There’s no challenge to the characters that belittle him. Every female character is an exaggerated, misogynistic stereotype, and the male characters constantly belittle each of them, with no recourse for their actions yet again. Even if this is simply a tonal issue, and the writers wished for each character to be facing judgement for their bigotted behaviour, it’s such surface level social commentary that it just becomes a vain, cynical decision, made with little thought to any consequence.
Films such as these that pit humans against each other, live and die by the quality of the performances and characters. What makes Battle Royale so good - which looks better and better, with each new ‘Triggered’ that comes out - is that it establishes the premise early, and the characters unveil themselves more and more throughout. It still manages to be silly, and show the darker side of humanity, but it doesn’t condescend ‘wokeness’ as if that’s some kind of subversive idea. The edginess of Triggered will be the main factor in the dating of the film. It’s not clever, and it’ll seem less and less clever, the more people look back at it. It needs something else.