Over the past 25 years, M. Night Shyamalan has built his reputation on twisty tales that sting with some nasty surprise before the end credits roll. Depending on the picture and the public's willingness to accept the director's oddities, his strategy has resulted in a handful of triumphs, a slew of mediocrities, and a couple of outright disasters. Going into Trap, one expects much of the same, but, in the biggest twist of all, Shyamalan has presented his audience with a fairly straightforward affair. The premise is simple, if ludicrous, the tone is sincere, and, for once, you feel the filmmaker's focus on entertaining rather than pulling the rug from under the viewer. M. Night Shyamalan's Trap is a B-movie that makes no apology about its ambitions or lack thereof…
The elevator pitch for Trap is rather irresistible – imagine The Silence of the Lambs set inside a Taylor Swift concert. Cooper Adams is a handsome firefighter who has secured tickets to take himself and his teen daughter, Riley, to a concert by her favorite artist. The girl's good grades warrant a reward, and since Lady Raven added an extra afternoon performance to her tour, the stars aligned for a rollicking father-daughter day. But when they enter the venue, the camera, attuned to Cooper's ever-alert subjectivity, spies an unusually strong police presence. It turns out the FBI is planning to use the concert to capture "The Butcher," a prolific serial killer who has eluded them till now. The monster is none other than the world's best dad.
Even before a blabbermouth t-shirt vendor reveals the authorities' scheme, Shyamalan has already shown us Cooper's dark secret when he takes refuge in a bathroom stall to check on his latest victim. The poor soul is tied and panicked in an undisclosed location, at the mercy of his captor, whose phone allows him to monitor the prey and release a deadly dose of carbon monoxide if things go south. Riley knows nothing about it, of course. Nobody else does besides Cooper himself. He's a man in constant deceit, playing the part of the good Samaritan with a zealous intensity that can be a tad off-putting. When framed in close-up, staring straight at the lens, the killer's insistent grin is a grotesque spectacle.
The cheery confrontation will send a chill down your spine, for the lizard brain within us all can't help but recoil from uncanniness. That smile will also make you question how anyone can be fooled by Cooper's act. In that sense, Shyamalan and his leading man, Josh Hartnett, are playing with a register of sincere insincerity. All of Trap revels in an earnestness at odds with its story of subterfuge and murder mayhem, but the monster's nature may be the most guileless creation of all. Rather than play the master manipulator, Hartnett invites the viewer to enjoy the barely concealed secret, telegraphing the killer's intent for all the world to see, almost winking at us while he does it.
In that sense, it's vaguely close to what great actresses of Old Hollywood did in the 60s and 70s when hagspolitation became a commercial safety net for those the big studios thought too old for star treatment. Or even someone like Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons, a masterclass in having the cake and eating it too, as she projects the self-satisfaction of a liar whose flagrancy never deters the other characters from believing her every word. And while Hartnett might vibrate with a cornered animal's anxiety and never come close to the heights of Grande Dame Guignol or Oscar-caliber actressing, he knows how to put on a show. In other words, he delivers what Shyamalan is asking and has fun with it while inviting the audience to the same.
Shyamalan has rarely known how to utilize a performer as well as he does Hartnett. Trap takes a scalp to the man's star persona, dissecting what made him appealing once upon a time, searching for the blandness that eventually turned that potential into dust and exposing it for all to see. But then, not content with his bloody deed, the director finds ways of turning fault into feature, calibrating the cinematic apparatus according to what his lead can give him, pushing the actor past such trivial matters as credulity or good taste. By the end, Shyamalan had converted me into a Hartnett believer, collapsing decades-worth of skepticism that only ever wavered thanks to Penny Dreadful and last year's Oppenheimer.
Moreover, the man behind the camera knows that Josh Hartnett is both dad and daddy – this is explicitly verbalized and there's no going around his gratuitous shirtlessness near the end of the movie, not that I'm complaining. Such matters may seem negligible, but I say no. Indeed, the filmmaker's eagerness to exploit his star's physique is part of a general enthusiasm that runs through every facet of Trap. From eye-roll-inducing pop psychology to its mid-credit tonal upswing, this is a project that doesn't take itself too seriously and would rather indulge in the form's pleasures than get stuck on the search for sophistication. Mostly, the approach works in its favor.
Because I want to end on a positive note, let's get the film's failures out of the way. None of the other actors are at Hartnett's level, though Alison Pill tries to give it a shot at the eleventh hour, and Saleka Shyamalan's Lady Raven feels especially ill-conceived. There's something heartwarming about her heroic framing, a show of the director's love for his daughter and his confidence in her star power. While she acquits herself nicely as a singer and songwriter, she lacks the presence and pizazz that earn the devotion exhibited by her character's on-screen fans. As the picture's POV temporarily aligns with the pop star, Shyamalan Jr. is also saddled with a tenor of close-up horror actressing that might be beyond her current range.
Then there's the matter of the structure, keen on keeping the thriller in motion even when that results in repetitive movements on the precipice of redundancy, or the debilitating underdevelopment of certain characters. Wasting Hayley Mills in what could have been a showcase role à la Betty Buckley in Split is downright criminal, for example. Though the family man tensions that rear their ugly head early in the story result in some fine-tuned cringe comedy, Trap all but forgets whatever it was setting up with Riley's ex-friends and their obnoxious mother. Regarding sight and sound, the whole thing's much sturdier, but it'd be remiss not to acknowledge the lackluster staging of such a massive concert.
Returning to what Trap does successfully, it's essential to acknowledge that the movie's real star is neither Hartnett nor the fictional Lady Raven. It's not even Shyamalan whose classicist eye continues to make him an outlier in modern Hollywood – a mainstream director who actually cares about blocking and composition. No, the real star is Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. The Thai cinematographer started his career working with Apichatpong Weerastehakul, shooting some of the 21st-century's most beguiling cinematic sights in a style that combined the tactility of carnal closeness with the mystic possibilities of a daydream. Recently, his work with the likes of Ron Howard and Luca Guadagnino has brought him to Hollywood.
Far from wilting under big studio pressure, the DP has flourished, bringing his impeccable craft to movies that could have easily succeeded without such exquisite lensing. Not only that, but he keeps a foot firmly planted in the arthouse. In that regard, 2024 is a banner year for him, starting with Challengers, going through the Cannes-lauded Grand Tour – probably the prettiest film of the year – now arriving at Trap, and then to Venice with Queer. As far as Shyamalan's picture is concerned, Mukdeeprom brings his usual flare to the proceedings, painting his grainy frame with saturated hues and a light that almost seems to possess a materiality of its own.
Shadows have substance in their inky blackness, and the contrast is sharper than what we're used to seeing in the pits of contemporary moviedom. The framing is often odd, playing with a precarious lack of balance when it's not centering the subject with such forcefulness the viewer's bound to feel an itch to reject its rigidity – I can't help but wonder how incredible the director's 4:3 framing idea had come to fruition. Color vibrates and varies, often unshackled from the demands of subtlety, the stagecraft in suspicious synchronicity with the character's interiority. Even the glare of phone flashlights can be exquisite under the right circumstances, the lifelessness of fluorescents can become an Expressionistic tool, and the flat light of suburbia is the cherry on top of this thriller sundae.
And just like the sweet treat, Trap may have little nutritious value, but it sure tastes nice as you gobble it up.
