West Sees the Forest for the Trees
Regardless of what audiences may think of the opening hour, director Ti West dishes out a genuinely terrifying payoff in the final 20 minutes of "Trigger Man," stringing together three heart-stopping moments that coalesce into a fascinating, frantic release of tension. The best of these moments involves little more than a female jogger as she runs through the woods, up to the edge of a cliff, and stops to stretch in the midday sun. The camera pans back and forth, watching her stretch. In this most mundane of moments, the hair on the back of your neck stands to attention as you wait for some unknown menace — maybe God himself — to swipe in and destroy her.
Stealing in parts from Gus Van Sant's "Gerry" and John Boorman's "Deliverance," Mr. West gleefully inverts the explicit, shock-a-minute formula that has rendered so many recent commercial horror films dead on arrival and turns those overt tricks into an oblique test of patience, a silent form of existential dread.
As a showman, Mr. West is keenly adept at reversing audience expectations from the very first frame. With a title like "Trigger Man," and boasting the name of a director already known among horror fans for his B-horror tribute, "The Roost," Mr. West seems determined early on to go against the grain and string his fans along, avoiding any hint of violence or danger for more than half the film. Instead, as the minutes creep, we watch a trio of young New York City men — played by Reggie Cunningham, Ray Sullivan, and Sean Reid — leave for the countryside, setting off on foot with hunting rifles in tow and itchy trigger fingers.
It almost seems a cruel joke on Mr. West's part to offer us these men and these guns, in a movie with this title, and to then bring the conventional narrative to a halt. As they hoof it through the woods, all notions of dialogue or drama evaporate, and we find ourselves suddenly in the land of "Gerry" — Mr. Van Sant's 2002 antinarrative that featured two men lost in the desert, walking for miles and miles without a word between them. Replace the desert with the forest and you have "Trigger Man": a movie that sits us down with two bored hunters, staring out into the forest with nothing to do.
Yet the farther these bored would-be hunters walk, the more effectively Mr. West draws us away from the movie's opening shot of a glimmering Manhattan skyline. Moving away from the city, away from the car, and increasingly away from one another, the men routinely pick up their rifles to look through their scopes, desperate to see anything through their shaky, quivering crosshairs. And then, before we have time to realize what's happening, Mr. West's camera has adopted the same shaky quality as it pans from man to man and looks down at them from afar, as if they're being watched through a scope. Without words and without a discernable story, the aesthetics come to the fore — every noise, every shift of perspective, every editing cut becoming a momentous event.
The end begins with a whimper. One silenced gun shot sends the men panicking, then a few more rounds leave one of them abandoned and raging, and his encounter with a female jogger turns a convulsing urbanite into a chiseled, crazed savage.
When a film abandons conventions to this degree, it risks alienating dogmatic horror buffs. But Mr. West proves courageous in the way he seemingly abandons any notion of story, making the mystery here not when the killer will strike — à la "Saw," "Halloween," etc. — but who the killer is, why he has chosen this day and this forest, and where his lines of sight lie.
More than anything, the movie is a marvel of sound design and spatial dynamics. Out in the woods, as two bored friends waste the hours (the movie is structured with time markers, much like "The Shining," which impart a real-time feel), it is Graham Reznick's sound mixing that orchestrates the tension, the static sounds of nature mixing with meticulously manipulated ambient noise and hypnotic musical variations. With similar craftiness, as the action shifts from the car to the forest, the cliff, and eventually an abandoned factory, Mr. West seamlessly choreographs the action to progress from dense foliage to dangerous, rugged terrain, to dark corners shrouded in shadows and — most creepy of all — flat, grassy openings that can be seen from those out-of-place buildings in the distance.
Produced by Larry Fessenden, whose own recent film "The Last Winter" amounted to a story about Mother Earth lashing out against the oil plunderers of the arctic, "Trigger Man" is intrigued by similar themes. Having left the glimmering city, where the hunters buy cigarettes at the local deli and argue with girlfriends, they are clearly ill prepared for the dangers of the wild. The silent suspense that envelops their story seems to position these three, and their insignificant weapons, against the vastness of the impenetrable forest. True, the real danger out there somewhere is a man, but as orchestrated here, Mr. West makes the rustling leaves, the gurgling water, and the chirping insects the harbingers of an omnipresent evil. Forget the fake blood — green is the color to fear.
ssnyder@nysun.com
