Review: As Horror and Satire, Triggered Barely Works Up a Sweat

Alastair Orr’s Triggered works within a recognizable horror-film framework, beginning with a bunch of twentysomething former high school friends reunited around a campfire and swapping stories and lobbing barbs at each other. Some are coupled up and miserable, others are single and horny, and all are generally unlikable knobs just begging for a massacre at the hands of a malevolent force. Except it’s not a masked psycho or an evil witch they need to worry about, but their high school science teacher, Mr. Peterson (Sean Cameron Michael), who’s hiding in the woods and preparing to subject them to a nefarious and insanely convoluted show of ultra-violence that would no doubt pique Jigsaw’s interest.

After the film’s young characters wake up from being gassed in their sleep and find themselves strapped into impenetrable explosive vests, Mr. Peterson promptly gives his victims the obligatory rundown of his plan. Ever since his son died years ago at one of the group’s high school parties, Mr. Peterson has held each one of them personally responsible. Now, the only way to beat the countdown clocks that light up their vests is to steal someone else’s time by killing them, until there’s only one survivor. It is, as Mr. Peterson states, his “one final lesson.”

Triggered isn’t the first time that Orr has mined horror from such Saw-like machinations, as his earliest two features, 2010’s The Unforgiving and 2011’s Expiration, delighted in throwing people into psychological and physical torture experiments under mysterious circumstances. This time, armed with a bigger budget and greater chutzpah, he goes about setting up the ultimate morality trap: Mr. Peterson’s game is designed to expose his victims for what they are—selfish, soulless members of a spoiled generation—and the audience is supposed to wonder which among them will first succumb to their murderous impulses.

Unfortunately, every character has been established as such a specific type—the tough guy, the brain, the laidback rocker, the sarcastic jerk, and so on—that it doesn’t take much mental agility for the viewer to guess how they’ll eventually behave in this violent free-for-all. “You’re the smart one and I’m the cool one,” one guy says to his girlfriend before the mayhem gets underway—and that’s about the extent of the film’s character shading.

Triggered aims for satire, namely at the expense of millennials, Gen Zers, and woke culture. But once you get past the faux-provocation of the film’s title, it’s difficult to tell what ideologies the filmmakers are trying to skewer. Screenwriter David D. Jones doesn’t have the finest ear for the way young people speak, defaulting to lame pop-cultural references (“I would go all Amber Heard on Johnny Depp and dump his ass,” one character says about her friend’s potentially cheating boyfriend) and copious uses of the word “bro.” When a plot development sees one of the guys come out as gay, the script makes sure to play the moment for homophobic laughs while also weakly acknowledging said homophobia a second later. In the end, the blunt-force trauma of such confused sexual politics makes it especially difficult to revel in whatever fun Triggered offers as a mindless diversion.