The Trigger Effect (1996)

(In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) There’s something typically American about movies in which people start shooting at each other the moment order is temporarily eclipsed by extraordinary circumstances. It tells us more about the low-trust people believing in immediate social breakdown than those who would, in theory, hasten that breakdown. Meanwhile, in the real world, most recorded instances of such sudden catastrophes show people helping each other in difficult circumstances—but that would not make a good catastrophe movie. So it is that The Trigger Effects follows an ordinary suburban American man—husband, father, good guy—as the entire area/state loses electrical power. It takes about five minutes for riots to begin and our audience stand-in to start stealing medication and brandishing guns himself. It’s both funny and sad that the film cranks up the paranoia to eleven so suddenly, but that’s the film that David Koepp (in his first but not last feature-length outing as director and screenwriter) wants to deliver. On a surface level, it’s not that difficult to watch—although the film errs in leaving the suburban house to head out to the desert in its second half, as the semi-episodic structure doesn’t seem to build upon itself. On the other hand, despite some very intentionally grim moments, the film isn’t easy to take seriously. The lead trio of Kyle MacLachlan, Elisabeth Shue, and Dermot Mulroney is quite good in an unstable-suburban-menage-a-trois kind of way, even if their issues are also shunted to the side during the last half of the film. While The Trigger Effect has apparently become some kind of cult classic since its unimpressive theatrical run, there are far better movies out there dealing with a social breakdown—and some of them may even be documentaries.