Warner Bros.
M. Night Shyamalan is a director I tend to root for.
In a world of franchise pictures and prestige horror, he’s doing high concept thrillers with a strong authorial voice.
I don’t like everything in his filmography, but when I saw the trailer for Trap it felt like a natural return to form for Philly’s Hitchcock.
Josh Hartnett plays a serial killer who’s barely holding it together when he discovers the pop concert he’s taken his daughter to is an elaborate trap to catch him.
It felt like the kind of contained, clever, premise that M. Night Shyamalan has always made his money on.
Unfortunately, it only lasts for two acts and there’s three in the film.
As ridiculous as the premise might be, the opening moves of Trap are devilish fun as Hartnett’s Cooper slowly realizes that something is very wrong at the concert venue he’s taken his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to as a reward for her good grades. Cooper befriends Jaime (Jonathan Langdon), a vendor at the concert, who informs him that the police know a local serial killer is attending the concert and they’ve locked it down to finally capture him.
Shyamalan’s direction during this section is excellent, even if some of his dialogue feels clunky. The camera is claustrophobic, bringing us right into Cooper’s head space as he starts to find angles to move around the security without arousing undue suspicion and the old Hitchcockian trick of just letting us spend time in the killer’s head as he’s being pursued, allows us to feel sympathy for him.
Unfortunately the tension and taut pacing of the first act is let down by an ending that backs away from the contained setting and feels like it comes from a much more conventional serial killer film, complete with a harried, relentless profiler character (played by English actress Hayley Mills) who is inside this killer’s head. It feels like almost a betrayal of the dark subversive comedy of the opening moves of the film.
Speaking of this specific point: Shyamalan conceptualized the film as a collaborative project with his daughter Saleka, who appears as “Lady Raven”, the main character of her latest concept album. Much has been made of this as nepotism, but in the opening sections of the film where Saleka is acting as a fictional pop idol as Hartnett is sneaking around and killing people it feels wickedly funny in the same vein as Hitchcock casting his daughter as the girl the killer becomes obsessed with in Strangers on a Train.
Of course, he couldn’t leave it at that.
When Cooper uses Lady Raven as his means of getting out of the venue, Saleka’s limitations as an actor get underlined and together with M. Night’s own cameo serves to take the audience right out of the mood of the picture. A thriller is a fragile thing: everyone’s had the experience of seeing one with a friend who can’t get into it and points out how unlikely a given event is and to see a director known for his thrillers undercut his own tension so strongly is just baffling and disappointing.
Trap really serves to underscore the strengths and weaknesses of M. Night Shyamalan as a filmmaker in 2024. He’s still got a strong handle on pace and can construct suspense set pieces that work very well.
Unfortunately, his dialogue seems to have become less natural as his career has progressed and his strong premises continually seem to fall apart in his third acts. Shyamalan has a sole writing credit on this film, and I can’t help but wonder if he had a trusted writing collaborator to polish his scripts, how much better his projects could be.
Includes featuettes, deleted scenes, and extended concert scene.
Trap is recommended for thriller fans only, with reservations. It is thankfully well paced throughout, but it is difficult not to see how this could have been great with a little more faith in the central conceit and a stronger conclusion.
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