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In “The Trigger Effect,” the power goes out, the phones go down, and the radio doesn’t work. Why, David Koepp’s thriller never says, proving less interested in explaining the problem than in seeing how the problem causes the world at large to react. Not well, it turns out, yielding fear and paranoia in the vein of the old Twilight Zone episode The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, not so subtly alluded to in a close-up of a Maple Street sign. Yet society in “The Trigger Effect” already seems to be teetering before the lights go out. This was longtime screenwriter Koepp’s directorial debut, and he was determined to prove himself, beginning the movie by bringing the title to life with an unbroken four-minute Steadicam shot in a mall (holla, 1996!) conveying a chain reaction of minor annoyances fueling anger and resentment and ending in a movie theater where a couple patrons talking over the film on the screen would seem to set up our protagonist, Matthew Kay (Kyle MacLachlan), to go full George Costanza only for him to chicken out. Later that night, the grid fails and all hell breaks loose.
Apart from one wide shot of Los Angeles going dark, Koepp never zooms out for a wider view of what’s happening, sticking close to Matthew, his wife Annie (Elisabeth Shue), their infant child, and eventually, their friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney) who stays over with things getting sticky. We meet some of Matthew and Annie’s neighbors, including their neighbor across the street, Steph (Bill Smitrovich), who briefly becomes embroiled in the plot, but Koepp prefers seeing the action through this makeshift trio as their own foibles bubble to the surface under the extreme circumstances. Indeed, as that opening suggests, “The Trigger Effect” is almost more interested in various crises of masculinity as in the paranoia and panic of the mob.
In this way, MacLachlan and Mulroney are perfectly matched. The former does solid work as someone insecure in his manliness and, by extension, his marriage. Koepp can occasionally lay that on way too thick, like a child’s electronic game beeping the world “yellow” at him as provocation to get him to steal his child’s penicillin when the pharmacist won’t distribute it in lieu of a prescription, but you can also feel him in virtually every moment trying to fill the shoes of what might have been a typical sort of male lead. Joe’s sudden showing up almost feels too convenient, but Mulroney sells it by making the character get a kick out of being a fly in the ointment. As for Annie, an insinuation about her checkered past suggests a femme fatale, though there is no real follow through, and is less interesting than some intriguing notes in Shue’s performance of significant postpartum depression that, alas, has nowhere to go. (Richard Schiff’s one scene appearance as a shady gun shop owner also deserves special mention. Schiff was born to play a shady gun shop owner.)
The gaps in the character of Annie show up in other elements of Koepp’s screenplay. Though we are made to believe that the structure of society is wobbling, the two times when the story requires police, they appear quickly and effortlessly. Everything also fits together neatly in the end, evoked in the recurring appearances of a tertiary character, Raymond (Richard T. Jones). Then again, I wonder if that is merely the ultimate evocation of the title. Raymond is one of the characters in the movie theater in the opening scene that Matthew fails to confront and when that moment comes full circle, the deliberate lack of a physical payoff becomes the emotional release. And tidy though it may be, Koepp does at least make room for one final bit of moral ambiguity, ensuring that even if the power returns, we understand that things cannot quite ever return to normal.
