Trap (2024)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan        Thriller/Horror/Crime          PG-13

1h 45m

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, Trap, embarks on an emotional roller-coaster for the first hour, then becomes a dragging dread for the final act. I don’t necessarily mean that the movie is bad, in fact I found it quite entertaining. But the final act of the film, including – what I believe to be – the trademark Shyamalan plot twist, just seemed as if it was going through the motion. Maybe the fifty-four year-old director has executed enough shock-inducing twists, and is ready for a new angle. Or, and I desperately hope this is not the case, perhaps Shyamalan’s magic has run dry and he is simply “going through the motions” to keep his name in the public sphere. But let’s not open this review with such a suppressive perspective, for Trap for the most part – is one of the better horror-thrillers in recent memory.

For starters, the typical three-act structure of screenplays is glaringly obvious, but in a rare case, this is not a bad thing. Its presence makes it easier to pick out the sections of the film that work – and work very well. In the case of Trap, the first act works so well, I found myself wondering if this would be the first Shyamalan movie since Signs that would be regaled with the stamps of “masterpiece”. The whole premise of the first act is quite brilliant: a notorious serial killer takes his blissfully naïve preteen daughter to the concert of her favorite pop star. Once they are in the stadium and the concert is underway, does the information conveniently fall into the father’s lap that the entire event is a trap, designed to catch this killer – who nobody happens to recognize. Cast Josh Hartnett, whose recent return to the big screen in Oppenheimer spurred high praise, as the father – and killer – and you have yourself a hit. And that is what the first act is.

Cooper, played ghoulishly well by Hartnett, encounters a series of convenient – or inconvenient – circumstances that lead him to a friendly merchandise vendor (played hysterically by Jonathan Langdon). The vendor is quick to give out “too much information” as the kids these days say, and thus we learn the information that sets the movie in motion. What ensues is a form of a heist movie, set inside a serial killer thriller. Cooper fenagles his way through unsuspecting security guards by donning a stollen badge from the friendly vendor. Both Hartnett and Langdon are giving notable performances in a film that – despite the casting of its protagonist – does not appear to be interested in the intellectual tango they are embarking upon. In fact, Shyamalan’s script is weak from beginning to end. It is unable to find moments of sincerity, upon which many of his past films have been able to balance. Instead, Cooper’s sincerity arrives thanks to the talent of Hartnett. His performance in the film is so captivating, that, by the time we arrive at the conclusion, the viewer is left to wonder if any moment he shared with his family – especially his daughter – was genuine, or a moment constructed by his sociopathic mind.

I could have watched Hartnett try to outsmart security guards, SWAT forces and the FBI for a full two hours and have come out beaming. His recent turn as Ernest Lawrence in Oppenheimer shows us that Hartnett plays an intellectual well. But the primary flaw of Trap, is that Shyamalan hides away from the trope of the “smart” serial killer (i.e., your Hannibal Lector type characters). Instead, the perspective shifts sharply to “Lady Raven”, the pop star whose concert Cooper has brought his daughter to. (Believe me, I know “Lady Raven is an almost hilariously awful name, but if I had to go along with it, so do you.) The star, played by Shyamalan’s own daughter, Saleka, is given the task – or rather forced into the task – of playing into Cooper’s hands, while attracting the attention of the authorities while saving his family and his “final” victim.

A note here about the crafts. The sound, while having been praised during the film’s theatrical run earlier this summer, was nothing special. There have been numerous other pieces that take place at a concert, so what was done there was nothing new or noteworthy. I do, however, want to spend a moment on the cinematography and the mise en scène. As a budding scholar of film history, I was particularly impressed with all of the nods to Demme and Hitchcock. Early in the film, and in the very final shot, Hartnett looks straight into the camera, smiling. While his screen presence is not nearly as magnetic as Sir Anthony Hopkins, this was indeed a noteworthy homage to the late Jonathan Demme, whose The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is one of the greatest serial killer films of all time – not to mention of the top Best Picture winners in the history of the Academy Awards. The nod to Hitchock is more specifically a nod to Psycho. The screenplay also alludes to the infamous noir-horror, in the many references to Cooper’s fraught relationship with his mother. Still, there are some low angle profiles that echo the framing of the ghoulish Norman Bates. Techniques like this, are indeed a reminder of the talent Shyamalan still possesses – should he choose to harness it.

What follows in the second and third act is a bizarre turn of events, that force the audience to suspend their disbelief almost in its entirety. But I won’t give that away here. I will just say that much like Shyamalan’s previous outing with Knock at the Cabin, Trap comes limping to its final conclusion – that isn’t even a concrete conclusion. And here lies the film’s fatal flaw. After roughly 100 minutes of an albeit – entertaining – but poorly executed cat-and-mouse game, Trap does not achieve anything with its ending. If you root for Cooper to get caught you don’t win, but if you root for him to escape, well, you also don’t really win. It was one of those situations that left me scratching my head saying, “what exactly was I supposed to get out of that?” There is no social commentary that came at the forefront of Knock at the Cabin or The Village and no sense of wonder that is a huge reason why I love Signs. Instead, Trap is merely another vehicle in the M. Night Shyamalan dealership. Entertaining? Absolutely. But. . .good? Well, this writer is purely flummoxed as to the answer to that question. I will leave that one up to viewers to decide.

★★½

Trap is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, VuDu, Youtube, or any VOD service.