Trigger is a Canadian film about two former bandmates, Vic (Tracey Wright) and Kat (Molly Parker), and their estranged relationship on the precipice of restoration: they reunite for the first time in a decade over dinner and a benefit concert honoring their music. The reunion takes place nearly ten years after their band, Trigger, crumbles under the combined weight of their former addictions: alcohol, drugs and each other.
Kat, the successful TV exec, tries to skate around their past troubles and quickly make amends. The understated Vic, perfectly content to remain a struggling artist for life, is more reluctant to forgive and forget. Although the film starts off simmering with tension and the promise of an intimate, honest look into their reunion, it merely falls flat with its overreaching dialogue that preaches more than it advances the narrative.
With both characters ensconced in a chess match of self-pity and the gospel of Alcoholics Anonymous fresh on their tongues, the film relays the struggles of recovering addicts more accurately than it unearths any sort of resolution to the conflicts these two share. Despite each new scene more loquacious than the last, we learn practically nothing of what Vic and Kat actually meant to each other, or what their relationship may become. It’s left unclear whether they were ever more than just friends, even though the flirty bickering and intimate insight they have into one another screams “ex-girlfriends.” Solid performances by Wright and Parker also manage to hint at a strong romantic subtext, leaving the viewer to conclude that the palpable tension between them is derived from the collective mourning of a great love lost.
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