Triggered: Review

29th September 2022

Ohio (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.) and Virginia (Caitlen Mehner) have broken into a U.S. senator’s house and are armed. Heidi (Tara Westwood) and her husband David (Robert John Burke) live in a very nice place and since Heidi became a senator it feels that they may have lost touch with reality. However, now is their time to answer for what the senator has done to prevent gun violence in her country and she’s going to learn a valuable and rather brutal lesson.

That’s because Ohio and Virginia are there to make a statement and to ensure that the senator changes her ways when she so easily passes on changing the gun laws.

Triggered is a short film directed by Tara Westwood and written by Thomas Dunn which seems to come from a passionate and personal place about the state of gun control in America. Although never mentioned, the names of the intruders clearly represent those states and their characters are living embodiments of how they must feel about gun control considering the atrocities that have occurred.

The situation also plays out as something all too real but also something many people have seen in cinema for many years. Whilst this makes the story feel more palatable it may equally make it all the more unsettling.

However, regardless of the good intentions of the filmmakers and the clear message they want to send, Triggered feels like a harsh public information announcement rather than an engaging story.

Being done in any other way may have lessened the impact of its message, but audiences will soon pick up on the subtext and those who don’t will have been already indoctrinated in US gun culture. There never really is a right time to bring up the subject though, and the dramatic impact that the story has works as well today as it may have done shortly after the shooting in Columbine over twenty years ago.

After every shooting it may feel like America has come to a breaking point when it comes to restrictions or an outright ban on guns. However, Triggered reminds people that there may not be a limit to that break.

Facebook

Google

Twitter

We hope you're enjoying BRWC. You should check us out on our social channels, subscribe to our newsletter, and tell your friends. BRWC is short for battleroyalewithcheese.