A Shock to the System (1990 film)


A Shock to the System is a 1990 American black comedy crime thriller film directed by Jan Egleson and starring Michael Caine, Swoosie Kurtz, Elizabeth McGovern, and Peter Riegert. It is based on the 1984 novel A Shock to the System by British author Simon Brett.

Plot summary

Henpecked husband Graham Marshall, a long-time executive in a large advertising company, is unexpectedly passed over for promotion by his obnoxious rival Bob Benham. Marshall is angry and disappointed. His wife, Leslie, is devastated and continually reproaches her husband for his apparent lack of ambition and willpower.
The night of the missed promotion, Graham is waiting for his train on the subway. An aggressive panhandler harasses him for being so rich and not giving him anything. In a fit of rage, Graham pushes him hard enough that he falls on the subway tracks and gets runover by an oncoming train. Marshall is able to leave unobserved, which gives him a whole new set of ideas as far as his future life is concerned.
Deciding to take revenge on the people who have caused him problems in his life, Marshall starts meticulously planning their deaths. First up, he arranges his wife's death by electrocution after nearly electrocuting himself and figuring out his delicate wife wouldn't survive the same incident. After that works to his advantage, he gets more ambitious and plan's his new boss's death. First he rents a car using his former boss's corporate account and procures a bottle of heavy downers from an office courier who deals drugs. Then he goes on a date with Stella Henderson, a female co-worker who has a major crush on him and laces her drink with some of the downers so she will be unconscious and then wake up later and think she blacked out from drinking and provide him with an alibi. Then, he sneaks out and drives the rental car to Bob's boat and booby-traps it by tampering with a natural gas tank and taping some matches to the door so when he opens it up the next morning, he will ignite the gas tank and blow himself up. As he returns home, he victoriously lights a cigar and absent-mindedly puts down his personalized gold plated lighter on the dash board of the rental car before returning it to the dealer and going home. The next morning Stella wakes up as expected and assumes she blacked out after having sex with Graham. Then, they spend the morning having sex to further cement Graham's alibi while Bob and one of his brown-nosing subordinates board his boat and blow themselves up. In the wake of Bob's death, his boss reaches out to Graham and offers him the promotion he wanted earlier. He accepts it and he and his new boss talk about how Bob died. He casually mentions how he never cared much for boats and always enjoying flying planes more.
As Graham is starting to enjoy his new job title, his world proceeds to get increasingly more hectic. Persistent police detective Lt Laker starts investigating the deaths that Graham caused and seems convinced almost immediately that Graham is responsible. He just needs some physical evidence to tie him to the crimes. Meanwhile, Graham realizes his lighter has gone missing and slowly pieces together that he must have left it in the rental car. Lt Laker talks to Stella about the deaths and she starts to think that Graham may actually be a killer. She retrieves the lighter from the car rental company and plans to meet Lt Laker on the same subway platform where Graham earlier killed the panhandler to hand it over. Graham gets to her first and they have a very tense conversation where it looks like Graham may push her onto the same tracks to make sure his crimes never get exposed. However, after verbally telling Graham how disappointed she is in him, Stella calmly hands him the lighter and then boards the train and leaves without further incident. As Graham exits the subway station, he runs into Lt Laker and victoriously lights a cigar with his retrieved lighter right in his face. Lt Laker has no choice but to let Graham go without any hard evidence.
Meanwhile, Graham's former boss George Brewster unknowingly had knowledge that could have been used against Graham had he testified. He could have mentioned how the car was rented using his account without his knowledge and that Graham had access to his account and it all happened on the night of Bob's death. Unfortunately for the investigators, George gets so depressed after being forced into retirement that he finds the rest of the downers that Graham had bought and in an act of retaliation, he kills himself by swallowing the entire bottle with a look of determination.
At the end of the movie, Graham is narrating about how everything is going much better at work with his enemies dead and him getting away with it all. He mentions how he does have one more tiresome detail to deal with. His new boss won't give up his corner office. As Graham continues to narrate, you can see a shot of his boss's plane flying and then sputtering and then starting to plummet towards some nearby mountains. The movie ends with the sound of the plane crashing.

Difference from the novel

The movie plot differs somewhat from the novel. The details of the deaths are a little different. In the novel, Graham kills the panhandler by clobbering him to death with a golf cart he got as a gift and throwing his body off a bridge into a river below. Then when he tries to kill his wife, he begins with a failed attempt involving him awkwardly buying some poison from a florist after acting very suspicious and lacing a whiskey bottle that his wife drinks constantly from with it so she will drink it and die. However, it turns the whiskey blue and it smells terrible and he knows there's no way she would ever drink it, so he abandons the idea and stashes the bottle in his shed. Then he kills his wife the same way as the movie and kills his boss the same way as the movie. His missing lighter gets resolved differently by his old boss George getting it since the car was rented in his name. He gives it back to Graham without realizing how damning it could have been to the police and Graham silences him by pushing him in front of a subway train to make sure he never talks to anyone else about it. Both the novel and movie end with Graham getting away with all of his killings. However, the novel then throws a final twist of irony at the end. There's a subplot featuring his mother-in-law, who is certain that Graham killed her daughter and is persistently trying to prove it. After Graham taunts her with the knowledge that he will never be prosecuted for it, he returns home from work one day to find Lt Laker preparing to arrest him. It turns out his mother in law found the poison laced whiskey bottle in his shed and she drank it and made a big show in front of his neighbors about how he tricked her into drinking it before dropping dead in front of everybody. That combined with the florist testifying about how awkward he acted when he bought the poison and a scorned Stella falsely testifying about how Graham always complained about how much he hated his mother in law, it looks very bad for Graham. After getting away with 4 murders, he is about to be arrested for a murder he did not commit.

Cast