Trap

For the first 10 or 15 minutes of Trap, Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is in dad-joke heaven, and writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is right there along with him. Cooper is taking his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the sold-out concert of pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan, the filmmaker’s daughter) as a reward for a great report card. Riley hasn’t quite reached the age where she’s fully, irrevocably embarrassed by her sweetly dorky father, which means he can get away with light teasing and joshing attempts to learn her slang—in between questions about her social life that show a genuine and touching concern for her well-being. With all the awkward sincerity and sweetly if corny father-daughter chatter, Hartnett proves he’s grown up and grown out of the former teen idol stage of his career, and Shyamalan couldn’t be more in his element if the arena turned out to be haunted.

It’s not, but Cooper is, even as fusses over his daughter’s well-being. He may not be all that enamored of Lady Raven which though tonally different musically is clearly supposed to stand in for Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo’s dedicated fan base; but he does his best to stay present and in the moment, perhaps aware that Riley will need a little overenthusiasm to make up for attending the show with her dad, rather than friends. Of course, Cooper, like most dads, is only human, and can’t help himself from occasionally glancing at his phone—not for the news, or sports scores, but to keep an eye on the man he’s holding in the basement of some undisclosed location. Because Cooper is also a local Philadelphia serial killer called The Butcher—and Lady Raven’s show is also, improbably but just go with it, a massive sting operation. Law enforcement has figured out that the Butcher, whose identity remains a mystery to them, will be at the concert, and they’re hoping to make escape from the building near-impossible.

Cooper has been correctly profiled by a supposed expert (Hayley Mills, who knows a thing or two about parent traps) as a relentlessly crafty fellow, and indeed, much of Trap involves watching Hartnett squirm and plot his way out of a big location that has turned into an extremely tight spot, made tighter by the fact that he has his daughter in tow. It’s a Hitchcockian scenario—only in Shyamalan’s version, it’s not a regular man thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but a genuinely guilty killer. Call it a Right Man thriller.

Shyamalan has revitalized his later-period career by going small: limited locations, intimate casts, Twilight Zone ideas executed in under two hours. That was actually true of his earlier genre movies, too, but it’s more obvious and pronounced in rigorously blocked and shot exercises like Old, Knock At The Cabin and now Trap—which further strips down the family dynamics of his last few pictures into something both slippery and agile. Working with Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and shooting on celluloid, Shyamalan constantly emphasizes the size of the venue and Cooper’s position in it without relying on many conventional wide establishing shots. Some of his techniques are relatively simple, like how Lady Raven’s performances are seen almost entirely from Cooper’s vantage. This means there’s no concert-movie swoop-ins intercut with the audience-level action, a limitation that has a subtle psychological payoff in later scenes. Elsewhere, the film uses extreme foreground and background action or overhead shots to make us search the frame for Cooper as he schemes for a way out. The camera is positioned with such a purposeful mix of disorientation and clarity that some shifts in audience point of view—for the initial stretch, we’re very much invited to identify with Cooper, despite his misdeeds—feel more surprisingly natural, and less jarring, than they should.

For all his formal rigor and ambition, Shyamalan adheres, sometimes rigidly, to genre convention. As with Old, Trap reaches a point where it could easily depart its mouse-and-cat reversals and thriller mechanics in favor of something trickier, stranger, and more profound. There’s a deep well of sadness underneath the premise—in trying to figure out how, exactly, Cooper plans to keep squaring his wholesome love for his daughter with his apparent compulsion to murder (and desire to escape). Hartnett plays this conflict perfectly, suggesting less of a façade and more of a well-rehearsed but maybe not quite perfect compartmentalization, long before Cooper brings up the subject in dialogue. Shyamalan seems a little bit reluctant to follow the father-daughter part of his story to its own discrete conclusion—but I believe that’s the crux of the story. Here is an artist who has made it clear over and over again how important his family is to him and even in his fiction he struggles to drive a wedge between a father and his daughter. To his credit, Shyamalan doesn’t try to make Cooper into a cuddly monster, while admitting in interviews that he identifies with the guy anyway, trying to parent his daughter from the correct distance. Yet there are times when it feels like he’s more comfortable staring into Cooper’s psychological abyss than stepping back for a broader view.

That’s in keeping with the filmmaking, at least, and maybe Shyamalan means for that tension to remain unresolvable; maybe that’s part of what gives Trap an eerie, uneasy power despite not invoking the supernatural touches Shyamalan is generally known for. Despite the lack of superhumans, ghosts, or ladies in the water, there are times when Cooper feels a bit like the James McAvoy beast and Bruce Willis hero from the Unbreakable trilogy, struggling to inhabit the same body, all while attempting to keep his daughter happier and healthier than he is. On one level, Shyamalan feels more comfortable than ever; Trap may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in his last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can’t, and probably shouldn’t, ever get out of his system.