While researching the strange machinations of the death industry, I was intrigued by the numerous stories of morticians, crematorium owners and morgue workers cutting up cadavers and selling off the body parts. I saw these horrific stories as tragedies: people who have become so desensitized to humanity through their work that the line of basic human dignity becomes increasingly blurred for them. How does their sense of morality, friendship and duty change as they violate the dead?

The idea for Harry’s character came about when I imagined how such a person would react if they had a loved one who was terminally ill. I wanted to see what would happen when the fear and helplessness of his mom’s imminent death crashed up against the clinical harshness that has been inculcated in him through working at the morgue. Informed by a friend’s experience with her mom succumbing to cancer, Harry’s journey is about the lengths people would go to in order to deny what they fear the most.

Harry’s financial troubles shed light on the plight of the millions of Americans who are trapped in a bureaucratic health care system that denies the sick treatment. Left with only dire options, Harry must do the unthinkable in order to pay for his mom’s costly cancer treatment. The gory nocturnal activity is a metaphor for what happens when financial calculus becomes the only criteria for dignity and welfare: people must stifle their empathy and cannibalize each other in order to survive.

Though macabre in its conceit, the film focuses on the effects that these desperate choices have on the lives and psychology of the characters rather than exploiting the easily shocking nature of the act. Why We Pull the Trigger is an uncompromising yet intimate look at the search for redemption in a world riddled with fraught situations and moral ambiguity.