Trap review
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Stars: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night Shyamalan, and Hayley Mills
Running Time: 109 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below.
Trap in many ways is representative of M. Night Shyamalan’s entire career, one showing a clear abundance of talent but also an odd deafness to the music of classic thrillers. He’s a rebel, someone who had always been an outsider to Hollywood, even when he achieved mainstream success within it. He turned just 29 years old in 1999 when The Sixth Sense was released to wild commercial and critical acclaim. It’s still Shyamalan’s cleanest screenplay, a movie whose 3rd act twist manages to do that impossible thing: both shock its audience and not emotionally undermine its previous scenes. By 2006’s Lady in the Water, his creative instincts embraced a self-indulgence that has permeated his work even since. In other words, his talent always shines best when he keeps his indulgent excesses under control.
In Trap both his strengths and weaknesses are on full display. It’s a film of lost opportunities, a Hitchcockian love letter that both delights and utterly frustrates. The peaks are so high, you can almost taste the sublime result of a deftly handled thriller, an almost Polanski-esque combination of suspense and supra-realism, but before the film is finished, Shyamalan reminds us that too often he’s a filmmaker capable of undoing his hard work.
The first two acts show such promise. As Shyamalan himself said, the pitch is, “What if The Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, a doting dad taking his daughter to see a live performance of her favorite pop star, Lady Raven. Within minutes an authentic intimacy is introduced – Hartnett is exceptional as the ever-so-slightly embarrassing proud dad, whilst his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), fizzels with adrenalized fandom and youthful exuberance. The police presence at the concert is significant. With a paranoid eye, Cooper focuses his shifty glance from his excited daughter to the presence of the FBI. As the lights go down and the pop music starts, the first reveal Shyamalan delights in giving us is that Cooper is a notorious serial killer and the concert is, well, a trap.
Shyamalan is clearing enjoying his goofy table-setting, and the fun is infectious. A puzzle is created – how does a serial killer get out of a venue on lockdown? And within this puzzle, Trap becomes a comedy of manners. Josh Hartnett revels in playing to the film’s key question: how can someone be a loving father and murder people at the same time? The real surprise is how funny the film is when its trying to provide an answer.
In a moment of giddy misdirection, the aisle of the arena raises up and Cooper sees his way out – under the stage. He tries to manipulate his daughter into escaping with him, tries to make the act of escape socially acceptable to a teenage girl. She replies to him in the way she should – “Dad, you’re acting weird.” Watching a serial killer remain in his seat to avoid embarrassing his Gen-Z daughter is the kind of social comedy I didn’t realize I needed.
As the stakes increase, as the concert continues, as the police close in on their suspect, Shyamalan’s extraordinary talent to eke out the small, suspenseful details of a single location spark moments of inspiration. As Cooper navigates and manipulates his way around the venue, he manages to grasp a police radio and uses the earpiece to listen to the police frequency. It’s another giddy delight to hear audio used to punctuate the thrills, to hear law enforcement comment their way around the stadium, to hear how close they’re getting to the suspect in the darkly crowded space.
So often Shyamalan shoots Cooper’s point of view completely subjectively, directly through his eyes. He wants us right in the head of his serial killer, inside his thinking, inside his ability to coerce others. For every minute we see the world through Cooper, we’re reminded of our ability to be manipulated by film itself. This is a character who has done hideous things, and yet we almost want him to escape, to solve the puzzle. For a time, Trap almost feels like a feature length movie of the TV-show Dexter, with all its inherent misplaced empathy for an anti-hero. We are now complicit with the crimes of a serial killer because we like spending time with him.
But by the third act, the suspenseful melting pot is entirely dismantled and reduced to a series of maddening confrontations. Once the stadium is in the past, once Shyamalan decides the story must move on from the carefully constructed set piece he’s masterfully created, what is left is unnecessary complexity and absurd leaps of logic. You can physically feel the film turn a hard right towards improbable. The dream of a great thriller breaks in two once Cooper is downgraded to a flatly drawn villain.
The issue is the shifting point of view. The complicit love/hate relationship with Cooper disappears and we’re provided with a new hero to support, which unfortunately comes too late and plays too weak. A series of escalating set pieces introduce an awkward slasher movie logic that feels ugly against the earlier sweatbox thrills. By the time characters provide unwarranted explanation for why an event took place, it’s all too much, too heavily drawn, too eager to leave every question answered. There are costume changes, multiple kidnappings, repeated captures and escapes. It’s a filmmaker running short of storytelling discipline.
Trap breaks its own rules. A trap is something you can’t leave, can’t escape. The promise is in the puzzle. What’s outside of the puzzle feels entirely superfluous. And yet Shyamalan cannot help but indulge himself with an increasingly preposterous set of circumstances. Even worse, Cooper is suddenly distant from us, hidden from view and rendered inhuman and monstrous. We’re robbed of our connection to the film’s central contradictions, its exciting comedy of manners, where killing a human seems frowned upon just because there’s so many people watching closely.
It’s an eye-rollingly bad conclusion to a delicious set up; a film that knows how to fly but not how to land.
