Film Review: Trap
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN’S BAD DAD NIGHTMARE
M. Night Shyamalan once again elevates the B-movie with formal lunacy, an all-timer performance, and a touch of the personal. Starting as a silly powder keg of suspense, Trap slowly evolves into a sinister transfiguration of spaces and a meditation on a universal fear: being a bad father. With off-the-charts thematic tension and the best work of Josh Hartnett’s career, Trap is Shyamalan’s answer to Wes Craven’s Red Eye — and just as fun. Minor spoilers ahead…
Grandma and grandpa aren’t who they seem, a beach that makes you old, a family caught in the grip of a doomsday cult. M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, Trap, carries its conceit in full lockstep with the filmmaker’s peculiar late style, exploding a galaxy-brained B-movie premise with emotional force and a touch of the personal. On its surface, Trap functions with the glee and abandon of something like Wes Craven’s Red Eye, down to its single location cat-and-mouse hunt that belies a wild third-act switch-up, but its deliriously entertaining facade masks perhaps Shyamalan’s most intimate film yet: a dizzying portrayal of shifting spaces that strikes at a universal fear - being a bad dad.
Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) is distracted. With floor seats at a sold out pop concert of Taylor Swift proportions with his tween daughter (Ariel Donoghue), his eyes dart back and forth among the exits. Relentlessly making trips outside the venue, he cases the place for any possible way out. “Let me know what I miss,” he tells her. No, Cooper isn’t an out-of-his-element dad shirking his responsibilities, but rather “The Butcher,” an infamous Philadelphian serial killer known for “choppin’ people up.” And the concert? An elaborately staged sting operation to catch him. With the FBI dragnet closing in on him, Cooper must simultaneously keep his goofy family man facade intact - especially in front of his oblivious daughter - while evading the authorities in an ambush specifically constructed for him.
“Trap carries its premise in full lockstep with the [Shyamalan’s] peculiar late style, exploding a galaxy-brained B-movie premise with emotional force and a touch of the personal.”
Even at its most literal, Trap is just plain fun. A single location thriller (until it’s not) that puts the squeeze on one of our finest character actors, it’s an absolute blast watching Hartnett’s Cooper juggle his goofy dad persona, a closing FBI contingent, and his own latent bloodlust. In a series of escalating hijinks, Trap apes the serendipity of video game logic to give its serial killer protagonist the upper hand. Maneuvering around situations many times by the skin of his teeth and pure luck, Cooper’s lithe escape act will likely attract the criticisms of “plot armor” and unwieldy contrivance, but it’s without a doubt by design; at this point in the director’s career, Shyamalan’s gauche dialogue and blunt dramaturgy are certainly features and not bugs, conjured as a dare for you to meet him on his stage of heightened reality. Dispensing with pretense and deconstructing the chase to its basest elements, Trap allows Shyamalan and DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom to cut loose with one great-looking movie: a suspense thriller as much about the transmutation of spaces as the culprit caught in between them. Inventive shot-reverse-shots, unflinching closeups, and sweeping POV pans all trace the contours of a mutating location, which jaunts from an awkward daddy-daughter concert venue into a steely deathtrap.
None of this would work nearly as well without the talents of Josh Hartnett, who likely gives the performance of his career in Trap. An alchemy of dead-eyed sociopathy and everyman civility, what matters most is his likability. As a walking paradox of work-life balance taken to life-and-death extremes, you might be surprised to find yourself invested not in Cooper’s potential capture, but in the unthinkable possibility that he just might disappoint his daughter. It only makes sense then that the film - without giving too much away - also heavily features Saleka Shyamalan as mega popstar and headliner Lady Raven. In a pithy retort to tiresome nepo-baby discourse, Trap’s most interesting metatext reveals itself as Lady Raven is increasingly folded into the narrative: Shyamalan has made a concert film for his real-life daughter that doubles as a noose around his protagonist’s neck. “Did my career make me a bad dad? Did having a family compromise my filmmaking?” Shyamalan probably doesn’t believe either of those things to be true, but they certainly transform a fun time at the movies into one with fascinating texture and tension.
