Trap (Shyamalan, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

M. Night Shyamalan is worried about the future, and worried about his kids. This is the not-so-subtle undercurrent guiding all of his recent work, which has coincided with a general reevaluation in critical circles and audiences alike. We can divide the career of this idiosyncratic visionary into four distinct camps – the early wünderkind era (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable), the backlash era (The Last Airbender, The Happening), the resurgent era (Split, Glass) and this recent era of fearlessly strange blockbuster cinema, peaking with the double punch of Old and Knock at the Cabin. Throughout, Shyamalan has existed on a very specific wavelength. One must take at face value the fact that these films will have an often bizarrely alien approach to dialogue and exposition, rendering their big name stars in hilariously wooden presentations. One must accept that the rules of logic and reason don’t really apply in Shyamalan’s worlds, and that there will be moments of abject weirdness that you’re unlikely to find anywhere else in the lacquered, homogenised blockbuster landscape of today. That’s because Shyamalan funds his own films, and fearlessly commits to his own vision, his work regularly outperforming expectations and flying in the face of the overtired narrative of Shyamalan as hack. This wavelength is certainly not for everyone, and there are plenty who cannot overcome the sometimes groan-inducing plot mechanics and nonsensical approaches to human interaction that made, for example, The Happening into a meme-makers dream. Simply put, though, for those who can see past that, there’s ample evidence of that filmmaker who once was touted as the next Spielberg, defiantly committing to his own instincts to wonderful results.

Like Old and Knock at the Cabin, Shyamalan’s latest, Trap, benefits from the director’s resolute subtextual honesty. There is something of Shyamalan, the comic-book loving, deeply strange auteur lingering in reappraised classics like Signs and The Village, and especially in Unbreakable, but as the director grows older, his films seem even more nakedly honest, reflecting on the shadow of mortality, and the weight of being a good father. All three of his latest films are enormously entertaining high-concept genre pieces, but Trap differentiates from the other two, replacing a core of solemnity with a gleeful mischievousness. One-time Hollywood heartthrob Josh Hartnett plays Cooper Adams – a ruthless, Dahmer-esque serial killer known as the Butcher – posing as a milquetoast family man, who takes his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to her favourite artist’s concert, Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter, pop songstress Saleka). When they arrive, Cooper becomes aware of an extremely heavy police presence, discovering later that he’s been unwittingly lured into a trap. Somehow, the feds know he’s going to be there – though they don’t know what he looks like – and have initiated a stadium-wide snap operation to catch him. The feds, led by a psychological profiler Dr Grant (Hayley Mills), are confident in their ability to catch Cooper, but the serial killer is a devilishly eely sort, making for a thrilling game of cat and mouse set largely in the cavernous halls of a giant arena.

M. Night Shyamalan continues his hot streak with this winkingly silly, deliriously fun thriller blessed with one hell of a concept. Featuring career-best work from star Josh Hartnett, it’s ludicrous, joyously messy popcorn entertainment, a victory lap from a director enjoying a career resurgence.

It’s a shiveringly fun, unapologetically B-movie concept, and Shyamalan has a ball in the early acts of Trap, as Cooper navigates through crowds and hides in plain sight, manipulating concert staff, cops and civilians alike with his neighbourhood dad persona. One of the great pleasures of a Shyamalan film is simply sitting back and watching where he places a camera – few since Spielberg have been as supernaturally adept at finding compositions of startling intelligence and confidence. Shyamalan navigates the concrete prison of “Tanaka Stadium” with ease, and though the film occasionally lags in tension, there’s never a dull or uninteresting moment. It’s Shyamalan’s most audaciously loose and messy script in years, with logical gaps mounting by the minute – why is the concert taking place during the day? Why are there lengthy breaks between songs? Why would the FBI ever think this would be a good idea in the first place? If you get snagged on these kinds of questions – and many have throughout Shyamalan’s career – you likely will not get much out of Trap. After the twin successes of Old and Knock at the Cabin, one gets the sense that Shyamalan is in the mood for a bit of fun, and Trap is hilariously self-aware and winkingly silly, resulting in a film no less filmically rigorous, but less thematically dense and portentous as those earlier films, for better and for worse. 

Fortunately for Shyamalan, he’s enlisted Josh Hartnett, similarly in the throes of something like a renaissance after his excellent work in Oppenheimer, who here turns in the best work of his career. Like the buzzy casting of Dave Bautista as Knock at the Cabin’s hulking, heartbreaking emotional anchor, Shyamalan here locks into the persona of a recognisable and often undervalued performer and finds ways to bring compelling new shades to the fore. Hartnett’s handsome, genial face is the perfect front, and when that mask slips, revealing a lurking monstrousness, it’s a joy to behold. It’s arguably the first time Shyamalan has centred a story around an out-and-out villain (Split and Glass’ bad guys being too empathetic to really count), and though it’d be a lie to claim Trap is a morally complex film, there’s a winning, indulgent nastiness to the way we end up rooting for this demonstrably hideous person to wriggle his way out of everything thrown before him, a Hannibal Lecter for the modern age. There’s a scary, pivotal mid-point sequence where Cooper reveals himself to an entirely unsuspecting individual that functions as the single best work Hartnett has done, and close to the best Shyamalan has done too. Trap is a worthwhile endeavour for that alone.

Throughout, it’s clear Shyamalan knows how entirely silly much of this is, but that approach nonetheless has its limits. Trap feels the need to keep the ball in the air for a little too long, particularly once the action breaks out of the stadium and into the suburbs around it. That’s not to say there aren’t setpieces of delectable feverishness to be found in these later moments, but one gets the sense of Shyamalan’s iron grip loosening. That said, it’s hard not to be energised by the final moments of the film, which pivot around a note-perfect act of symbolic liberation, pointing us back to Trap’s north star – the relationship between Shyamalan and his children. It’s fascinating to try and locate Shyamalan within Trap, whether that be through the genuine love Cooper and his daughter share, the presence and performance of Shyamalan’s actual daughter Saleka, whose music is given an extended platform and focus, or in the ghostly presence of Cooper’s own mother, who for intriguing, ambiguous reasons is positioned as the core motivation for Cooper’s psychopathy. Shyamalan is worried about his kids’ future, and worries about seeing them grow up, this much is certain. In Trap, as in Old and Knock at the Cabin, said children serve as both a source of anxiety and of spiritual salvation, even transcendence. It’s an undercurrent that lifts all ships, logic be damned. 

Trap is in cinemas now.

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