'Trap' review
Ten minutes of any M. Night Shyamalan movie will be masterful. Impeccable off-kilter framings. Edits that linger eerie seconds too long. His close-ups are wonderful: Actors ACTING, staring right into the camera with rictus smiles and blinkless eyeballs. He is a patient director and an impatient writer who delicately stages his absurd dialogue. (The habit dates back twenty years to The Village, his first calamity, which features so many gorgeous-looking dumb conversations.)
In Shyamalan’s ludicrous new thriller Trap, Josh Hartnett’s killer dad Cooper speaks twice with another parent from his daughter’s school. The nature of their interaction is nonsense — they keep running into each other at a crowded concert — and their kids’ beef involves inscrutable TikTok etiquette. Yet Shyamalan films them like he’s presenting an interrogation, or the lead-up to an execution. Hartnett is good and ridiculous throughout the film, but as the friend’s Cool Mom, Marnie McPhail dominates her few scenes with playful passive-aggression. She’s annoying, outrageous, sly. A threat, too, as dangerous to Cooper as the policemen swarming the arena. McPhail’s a lifer bit-player, swallowed by the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact. But Shyamalan has this ferocious conviction that, for a moment or a whole runtime, he can make anyone a star. Even — twist? — his own children.
Cooper has brought his teen Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a pop icon’s arena tour. The musician is Lady Raven, played by Saleka Night Shyamalan, who contributes her own songs. It’s a daughter movie in every way, the dad character bringing his kid to watch the director’s kid perform. (Shyamalan himself plays Lady Raven’s uncle, continuing his unbroken streak of laughably bad performances.) Cooper starts to notice strange things happening around the concert. More cops than there should be; men pulled out of their seats. We notice strange things about Cooper. A live feed on his phone shows a chained prisoner screaming. A merch seller named Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) reveals the event is a sting operation to catch the Butcher, a hack-em-up local monster.
No arena employee has ever been as talkative as Jamie. And everything about Trap’s premise is immediately absurd — how the cops know where the Butcher will be, why they let such a known threat loose in a crowd full of potential victims — but the movie cruises for awhile on Hartnett’s plainfaced plotting. The clever madman keeps trying, and failing, to find a way out — while also trying, and succeeding, to be a supportive father. Legendary Disney moppet Hayley Mills plays the profiler guessing his every move. You’re talking to a guy who recently read the Parent Trap star’s memoir — a date with George Harrison, Walt Disney guiding a Disneyland tour, getting tan on the Swiss Family Robinson beach! — so her appearance here was my own personal Channing Tatum Gambit.
Knowing nothing, I feel strongly that Trap is a psychological autobiography of how Shyamalan felt taking his own kids to see Taylor Swift. Cooper even gets Riley rich-person floor seats, unlikely on a fireman’s salary even with a murderous side hustle. (Later backstage scenes feel written by someone famous enough to expect lots of the attention.) There’s real dark comedy in the clash between cat-and-mouse horror and teenybop solemnity. Some narrative finger tapping some cultural pulse here, a killer at a fictional concert right as the Eras Tour gets terrorized out of Vienna.
Saleka Night Shyamalan: Her music’s fine. Her choreography looks remedial, frankly cheap, and there is too much of it. She’s onstage for a lot of Trap, and Shyamalan almost nails a particular Targets dynamic, where Celebrity and Killer are unknowing co-stars gradually pulled towards each other. I say “almost” because the last half hour of Trap throws everything out the window. Lady Raven becomes the focus, kind of, and her behind-the-scenes life is notably unconvincing. (Her entourage, I kid you not, includes ZERO PEOPLE.) Because I paid attention to the opening credits, I kept waiting for Alison Pill to show up. She barely does, then really does. Five unbelievable things happen, and then fifteen unbelievable things happen. I don’t buy Harnett as a devious mastermind, but the old hunk gives good maniac and great Daughter Dad. The Nepo Baby thing is a problem, no question. A movie about a Disturbing Concert suddenly becomes about how Pop Stars (Like My Kid!) Are Really Nice.
Still, I recommend Trap. What makes Shyamalan fun also makes him exasperating: You don’t know where his story’s going because he barely knows himself. There’s an unmistakable rough-draft quality to some later veers, with several weird incidents that lose track of the central parental dynamic. This week I finally caught A Quiet Place: Day One, this summer’s way more successful thriller-horror hybrid. The prequel spinoff’s find-the-thing plot coherence and read-my-poetry emotional resonance is much cleaner than Shyamalan’s who-did-what-now razzle-frazzle, and it is soooooo boooooring. In summer 2024, just-fine IP extensions left me feeling pretty trapped myself. I’ll take any escape I can get. Even if — for no reason we could figure out — it’s the escape where Josh Hartnett climactically takes off his shirt.