Trap (2024)

If movies won Oscars for their marketing campaigns, M. Night Shyamalan would be sitting pretty. The trailers for his films are invariably intriguing. The writer-director whose works range from the sublime The Sixth Sense to the opposite-of-sublime The Happening has an indisputable gift for high concepts perfect for elevator pitches. And since Shyamalan has been dogged for decades as the Twist Ending Guy, moviegoers in the know tend to invest each new picture of his with an expectation that there is something more to the story. What is the trailer not telling us? 

What makes that expectation game all the more puzzling, at least for me, is that Shyamalan rarely makes good movies. Too often he is unable to navigate the tightrope set by his own perilously high concepts.

That brings us to Trap. If you’ve been to a multiplex within the past eight months, chances are good that you’ve seen at least one of its trailers. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, a doting father who is treating his tween daughter to a Taylor Swift-styled concert. Dad takes note of an unusually heavy police presence. A chatty guy hawking merchandise confides to Cooper that the entire concert is an elaborate trap to catch a serial killer whom authorities have reason to believe is at the show. A follow-up trailer for Trap offered yet another twist: Cooper is the serial killer, whom the news media have dubbed “the Butcher.”

For the first two-thirds of Trap, Shyamalan is mainly up to the challenge of his nifty premise. Cooper and daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) have arena floor seats at a Philadelphia concert for a pop goddess known as Lady Raven. Cooper is an appealingly goofy dad: well-meaning but awkward, and at the ready to embarrass himself with a dumb joke. Hartnett and Donoghue have an easy, sweetly affecting rapport. Trap is at its best when focused on this father-daughter relationship. The parental affection feels especially genuine when you consider that Shyamalan has cast his own real-life daughter, Saleka Shyamalan. an accomplished singer in her own right, as Lady Raven.

Still, Riley can’t help but notice how her dad is acting strangely the longer the concert goes. We in the audience know why. Once Cooper learns everything is a trap staged by an FBI profiler, he finds multiple excuses to roam the arena in search of an escape without arousing suspicion. That profiler, by the way, is played by Hayley Mills. Yes, it’s that Haley Mills, of Disney’s 1961 family classic, The Parent Trap; not a bad in-joke for cinephiles.

The arena scenes, while filled with contrivances, are still fun. Shyamalan keeps the suspense at a steady simmer, aided by the fluid camerawork of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who also lensed this year’s equally gorgeous Challengers) that effectively forces us into the perspective of the besieged killer. In perhaps Shyamalan’s neatest nod to Alfred Hitchcock, with whom Shyamalan has often (and unfairly) been compared, the audience finds itself grudgingly rooting for the bad guy. Think of Strangers on a Train‘s psychotic Robert Walker trying to retrieve incriminating evidence, and you get the idea.

But this is an M. Night Shyamalan film, don’t forget, which means a third-act revelation provides one outrageous twist too many. I won’t say more about the particulars other than it involves a late-addition character. Like an errant move in Jenga, the narrative stumble sends all those earlier contrivances – the exceedingly talkative merch salesman, a conveniently available police radio, an FBI profiler with superhuman capabilities – crashing to the floor. Come to think of it, how likely is it that law enforcement would be willing to endanger an arena of 20,000+ people by concocting a pressure-cooker for a serial killer?

Shyamalan’s ambivalent relationship with dialogue can also strain believability. In Trap, a police briefing turns into an earnest diatribe about how one of the Butcher’s victims was a beloved teacher voted “most popular” by their students. The FBI profiler dishes out dollops of psychoanalysis to explain the serial killer. Such expository babble wasn’t necessary when Hitchcock employed it at the end of Psycho; it is even more extraneous amid today’s preponderance of true-crime literacy.

The result is that Trap is sometimes intentionally funny. and sometimes you’re not so sure it was on purpose. Fortunately for Shyamalan, he has Josh Hartnett delivering a perfect mix of conniving and campy. With his tightly fixed smile and eyes that register desperation, Hartnett makes Cooper more compelling than the script likely did. It’s a big performance, and it helps Trap escape mediocrity.