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Review

Only in his mid-twenties, Delawarean director Ti West has already enjoyed a significant success in the independent horror arena with his film, The Roost. For his second feature, Trigger Man, West shifts focus from the old-school supernatural chills of his debut to a more abstract, cinema verité-styled suspense thriller with a heightened sense of realism. Three friends in Manhattan travel to rural Delaware to hunt deer (those familiar with Wilmington might note that the film is actually shot in that city’s Rockford Park), and after a morning of male bonding, shots ring out and they quickly find that they are the ones being hunted. Soon others in the park become involved, and it becomes clear that a psychotic sniper (or snipers) is in the woods…or nearby. Executive-produced by director Larry Fessenden (Wendigo), Trigger Man is, in the words of West (who also wrote, edited, photographed and co-produced), “an existential and borderline experimental art-horror film,” and that’s an accurate assessment. Like another Danger After Dark film, the excellent French shocker Them, West’s film makes the threatening forces largely anonymous and random — and the violence, while gory, is sharp and sudden (thankfully, this is not another “rural psycho torture” movie).

 -- Travis Crawford