TRAP (2024)

A father and his teen daughter attend a pop concert only to realize they've entered the center of a dark and sinister event.

by Alexander Boucher 12th August 202412th August 2024 1

The poster for the new thriller Trap features the words ‘A New M. Night Shyamalan Experience’ in large letters above the title. It’s telling. For several years in the 2010s, his name was almost impossible to spot on the posters for films he made. The critical disappointment of his eco-horror The Happening (2008) led to cynical marketing teams all but scrubbing his name from the posters for his next two films. They were both family-friendly entries with large budgets and little indication as to who made them.

But after the success of the director’s latest string of films, which saw a return to the imaginative genre fare that made him a household name, his name is unmissable once again. These aren’t just films that he has joined as a director, these are Shyamalan experiences—cleverly engineered thrillers designed to catch the viewer in the web of a modern master.

And above the poster’s promise, in even larger letters, is the name Josh Hartnett. He’s the star of Trap, an actor whose name to many will evoke memories of teen comedies, magazine cutouts taped to the inside of lockers, and an ineffable Y2K-cool. Their names together, front and centre, seem to offer a potent blast of nostalgia, an irresistible trap in itself for elder millennials, to whom The Faculty (1998) and Signs (2002) were key texts.

It’s heartening to see. But if this were an exercise in nostalgia and nothing more, then it would not be much of a trap. Instead, it lures us in with a killer premise and an actor who seems like an old friend, only to slowly reveal new tricks, strange diversions, and the truth of what is weighing on Shyamalan’s mind as he approaches his mid-fifties. For the Shyamalan faithful, this is not a trap at all… this is the place to be.

Trap follows doting father Cooper (Hartnett) and his precocious daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue), as they attend the concert of her favourite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan). On the car ride to the arena, Riley sings along passionately and tunelessly to the songs of her idol. “Yeah! Maybe!”, is Cooper’s response when she says she would like to grow up to be a singer, not exactly Vicky Krieps telling her daughter that she cannot wait to hear her singing voice when she is older, but still gentle.

He is also affable, supportive and charming. Pretty much the worst thing we can imagine Cooper being guilty of is a corny dad joke. But unlike his previous films The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Village (2004), Shyamalan is quick to beat us to the punch. Within the film’s first 15 minutes or so, we learn that the concert is a giant ruse to trap notorious serial killer ‘The Butcher’, whom the cops know will be in attendance. Shortly afterwards, we follow Cooper into the stall of the bathroom, where he covertly watches live-streamed footage of a man shackled in a basement. He is The Butcher, and Shyamalan is not waiting around for us to get there first.

After decades of repeated and inaccurate claims that his films are glorified plot-twist delivery systems, Shyamalan gets in front of audience expectations, and in the process affords his film a great sense of freedom and lightness, even as things grow evermore twisted. It doesn’t mean there are no surprises—there are plenty in Trap—but this is a film about manipulation and machination, and the joy is in watching an escape artist wriggle his way to freedom.

As Cooper, Josh Hartnett is fascinating. His gee-whizz wholesomeness is endearing then uncanny, his eyes barely concealing a mind that is constantly in motion. He might smile and make corny jokes, but his mind is filled with blueprints, escape plans, and final acts. His face, which has hardly changed since 1999, still contains a boyish likeability. But his smile is a bit too tight, the fear in his eye hard to spot but always there. Cooper has two halves, he tells us. Hartnett’s energy is electric, stirred up by those two halves slamming into each other. There are always synapses firing wildly. You can catch him staring at something and realise he is elsewhere, not seeing a stage or an audience or even his daughter.

At one point, a guest singer rises from a trapdoor in the arena floor, and Cooper suggests to Riley that they sneak off and see where it leads. She responds that he’s being weird. Of course, he is. The concert means a lot to Riley, as it does to the thousands of other kids there, crying and screaming for their icon. But, like a typical dad, his other life has gotten in the way. Why, she must wonder, would he care about anything else but the moment at hand right now? How could his mind be elsewhere?

His mind—and his body—are rarely in the moment. We follow Cooper to merchandise stands, food courts, dressing rooms, tunnels, and tech areas, each cleverly used as a stage for Cooper and whichever character he’s performing. In one rooftop sequence, he pretends to be a nervous food stand employee under the thumb of his manager. In another, he’s confident and casual, weaving in and out of SWAT teams so he can eavesdrop on them. Other times, he’s the loving father we first met, looking to get his daughter a tour T-shirt.

Cooper understands how to bend the world to his will. Handsome and genial, he strolls confidently through the venue, casually convincing the people around him to divulge secrets. One person, a merchandise guy named Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), even asks Cooper to hold a box-cutter knife for him, after revealing to him the secret purpose of the event, and the reason for all the heavy security.

Only staff and the surrounding law enforcement are cleared to know about the nature of the trap, but now, thanks to a nice smile and his preternatural ability to lie on the spot, Cooper is a step ahead of his would-be captors. Even he can’t quite believe he’s just been handed a weapon. Some people have all the luck.

A walkie-talkie snatched from the SWAT team informs Cooper of their every move, and he even learns of the password used by employees to identify themselves. It’s both maddening and thrilling to watch Cooper work. He seems to get away with everything, and perhaps we want him to. Maybe that’s the point. Charisma is the only thing that separates those we want to see succeed from those we want to see fail. It’s a currency, and Cooper’s spending his on avoiding the consequences of his actions.

Shyamalan complicates things with the simple detail that Cooper seems to care about his daughter genuinely. Whether or not this is another performance of his remains to be seen, but Cooper and Riley share a lot of scenes, and they each contain a lot of love. If this concert had not been a trap, Cooper and Riley would still have gone, a loving father giving a great gift to his child.

Later, Cooper devises a plan that will get him and Riley backstage, the only place with an exit that is not riddled with SWAT teams and police officers. Lady Raven, Cooper’s told, always picks a child out of her audience to dance with her, before they get to hang out backstage. A sure-fire way out, certainly…

But Shyamalan allows for another possibility. Maybe Cooper does want his daughter to have the night of her life. Maybe he does want to see her in front of thousands of screaming fans, her image transmitted to gigantic screens, larger than life and more loved than he will ever be. Maybe his worlds and his intentions can be separated, two alternating truths taking their turn in the spotlight.

Cooper needs Riley to escape, but she needs her dad to look after her, too. Shyamalan, never one to shy away from airing his anxieties, shows up briefly as Lady Raven’s uncle. Lady Raven is played by Shyamalan’s real-life daughter, Saleka Night Shyamalan. In an era of intense scrutiny around the idea of ‘nepo babies’, Shyamalan reveals a deeper concern: how long will it be before I’m the one who needs help from my children?

Just as Shyamalan provides his daughter with a major platform for her acting, singing and songwriting, she, like all children, offers her father a world of sharpness, youth, and creation. It’s mutually beneficial, enlivening his work with a freshness of perspective that makes Trap feel as distinctive as Old (2021) and Knock at the Cabin (2023) and did before it. Shyamalan may have themes that he often returns to, but he always seems to find new details to wring from them, new angles to approach from. What better idea generator is there than your kids?

Here, the approach rings with the eternal hope and worry that our children will be our betters, that they’ll achieve more than us, and how we let them down will fuel their drive to be stronger and smarter than we are. In one scene, Lady Raven asks her audience to shine the light on their phone and hold it aloft if they feel as if they’e forgiven someone who has hurt them. Her father, she says, abandoned her when she was young, leading to years of pain. Riley holds up the torch on her phone. Cooper doesn’t. Perhaps he wasn’t listening.

Just as Cooper can’t stop devising new methods of escape, one imagines Shyamalan being dragged along to a concert, perhaps by his own daughter. Maybe there, he had a similar moment while some pop star danced on stage, and had the epiphany that this might make a great movie. Artists and killers, hopelessly unable to give up the chase, their minds always ticking away, louder than the voices of their loved ones.

Cooper might be the reason Riley switched her torch on, and he might know that his double life will only cause agony for his family. But the backstory is trivial, motivation essentially irrelevant. This is about what happens afterwards—the desire to either reckon with what you are or to escape it.

And as Trap progresses, the desire to keep escaping becomes like a drug. Guilt is one thing, but when situations escalate they become impossible to stop or resist, and Cooper is laughing giddily at the unbelievable realisation that this could go on forever if someone doesn’t put an end to it for good.

Shyamalan has rarely allowed himself to delve into an idea quite so bleak. But Trap remains buoyant and lively, even as the skies darken and the action shifts dramatically in the second half. His ability to sustain tension for a film’s duration is still practically unmatched, and his visual style has only become more refined over time. Trap is a subtly dazzling film, utilising screens, walls, hallways, and doorways to tell a story of confinement within a society. The elegance of one shot—which peers into a SWAT control room on one half of the frame, and down a tunnel on the other half, with a doorframe acting as a sort of divide between the two—is remarkable.

Shyamalan and first-time collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who serves as cinematographer, aren’t showing off. They’re in control and confident enough not to rely on tricks. They simply understand what works. Take, for instance, the moment that Shyamalan’s trusty point-of-view shot is first deployed. As a character looks down the lens of the camera, it’s difficult not to be hit with feelings of intimacy and conspiracy. It may be one of the director’s most familiar images, but he keeps finding new ways to implement it, with new feelings wrung from it each time. Mukdeeprom’s exemplary work on Suspiria (2018) and Memoria (2021) was hypnotic and ethereal, and towards the end of Trap that mastery transforms familiar places into ghostly dead-ends of domestic unease.

To be certain: the film’s final act will disappoint some. Shyamalan shrinks things down as they tighten, leading with fraught emotions and ugly conversations rather than pyrotechnics. But anyone receptive to what Trap is saying should find it a satisfying final reel, digging deeper into the themes of not only this film but the films he’s always made. They have always been about relationships and our duties towards them. His plots are appealing, but they are springboards to get into the real nightmares that keep him up at night.

Trap is full-force Shyamalan. An experience, or nightmare of his, one might call it. He hasn’t changed the things in his craft that have divided audiences, and nor should he. His dialogue is as idiosyncratic as ever, the performances are broad and out of step with the imitation brand ‘naturalism’ that is so popular now, and the whole thing is as silly, earnest and, yes, twisty, as one hopes.

But look beyond this and you’ll see a director pushing himself further each time, digging beneath the strange flesh of his worlds to figure out exactly what makes them tick. Aided by a triumphant turn from Hartnett, Shyamalan’s most entertaining film in years is perhaps his most self-reflexive and dark. After years of considering how one protects their family from the evils of the outside world, Shyamalan considers, finally, that the call may be coming from inside the house.