Trap review: M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller is deeply stupid

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You don’t go to an M. Night Shyamalan movie expecting airtight logic. Who really cares why aliens with an allergy to H2O would invade a planet covered in water? And if you can’t get past what would happen if a plane flew over a community frozen in time, you’re going to have a rough go with his most gorgeous allegory. But there’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s what Shyamalan asks of his audience with his new film, Trap. This patently absurd thriller doesn’t just strain credulity, it strangles it, wraps it in plastic, and leaves it rotting in a dumpster. There’s scarcely a single plausible moment in the entire film. Whether you can roll with that will depend on how much juice you think it manages to squeeze from its pulp premise. 

On paper, Trap is very juicy indeed. The plot revolves around Cooper Adams (Josh Harnett), a middle-aged firefighter who takes his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see her favorite artist, a pop star named Lady Raven. Speaking of clutch dad moves, Raven is played by the filmmaker’s daughter, real-life singer Saleka Shyamalan, and the film grinds to a halt several times throughout to simply watch her perform her sultry mid-tempo anthems, the camera itself almost beaming with pride. M. Night may never win an Oscar, but between this and recently producing the feature directorial debut of his other daughter, he’s definitely got a shot at the award for Father of the Year.

The writer-director of The Sixth Sense made a name for himself springing big twists in the closing minutes of his soulful multiplex knuckle-whiteners. Here, though, he lays most of his cards on the table upfront, privileging suspense over surprise. As an improbably loose-lipped merch vendor lets slip to Cooper, the police have targeted Raven’s concert for an elaborate sting operation. They have reason to believe that one of the 20,000 people in attendance is The Butcher, a serial killer stalking Philadelphia who leaves people chopped up in little pieces. 

The police are right. The killer is there. He’s none other than Cooper, who we’ve just seen sneak off to the restroom to check in on surveillance footage of his latest victim, who is chained to a pipe in a basement. If nothing else, Trap is worth seeing for how deviously it casts Harnett against type. Shyamalan subverts his star power twice over — first by making the one-time teen heartthrob of The Virgin Suicides and The Faculty look profoundly unhip, then by flipping his dorkiness into malevolence with the reveal of what Cooper does when his family and co-workers aren’t watching. It’s a ghoulishly entertaining performance, with Harnett letting darkness peek through the cracks in his grinning dad-joke routine. 

Much of Trap unfolds within that concert hall, as Cooper scrambles to improvise an escape strategy, all while playing supportive dad to his blissfully unaware kid. But while it’s theoretically fun to see Shyamalan once more play with the spatial and conceptual limitations of a single setting (his last few movies have all been similarly contained), the problems begin with the setup. The concert hall doesn’t look big enough to be hosting a Taylor Swift-style megastar — it’s like a college gymnasium subbing in for an arena. Lady Raven keeps taking conveniently long breaks in the middle of her set, allowing Cooper and Riley to leave their seats and wander around the venue. And what teenage stan would be fine missing even a moment of the performance, let alone returning midway through her favorite song? Watching Trap, you’d swear Shyamalan had never been to a live show. The mania of pop fandom is clearly an abstract concept to him.

Is this nitpicky? Bigger holes quickly develop in the plot. For a while, you wonder how the hell the authorities would ever even know that Cooper is coming to the concert. The answer the movie eventually provides is an enormous stretch. Anyway, how exactly do the police plan on catching him? They’re working, we learn, from the barest of physical descriptions. The sting seems to hinge on the eagle eye of Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills, grown star of the original Parent Trap, har har), a profiler who just kind of hilariously stands around, eyeing the crowd, as though she’ll be able to identify the killer on sight. She’s like the clairvoyant crime fighter of Shyamalan’s Unbreakable crossed with the walking exposition-machine doctor of Psycho.

A little verbal and narrative awkwardness always comes with the territory of a Shyamalan movie. Trap is among his clunkiest in that department, a thriller where everyone — from the killer to those hunting him — makes baffling decisions. The dialogue has that signature robotic clang. “I’m not great at a lot of things,” Cooper confesses at one point. “But keeping my two lives separate is not one of them.” Say again? This isn’t his most visually dynamic movie either, despite the presence of the great Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Challengers, Memoria) behind the camera. There are times when it’s obvious that Shyamalan is maneuvering around his budgetary restrictions, but he’s not always successful at obscuring crowd size and creating the impression of a larger space.

You can see what he’s after with Trap. The movie wants to devilishly toy with our sympathies — to sync our nervous system to the sweaty survival moves of a psychopath. In that way, Shyamalan is communing with the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, doing his own spin on the bumbling crime spree of Norman Bates. There’s something plainly personal here, too. The film is most emotionally satisfying when viewed as another meditation on the anxieties of fatherhood, à la Old and Knock at the Cabin. In following a bloodthirsty maniac who also happens to genuinely love his family, Shyamalan is probing the way all parents compartmentalize aspects of their lives. He explores the idea most potently during a disturbing, restrained kitchen conversation — the one moment when Trap really stares into the darkness.

But the resonant aspects of this game of cat and mouse end up buried under a mountain of contrivances and improbabilities, from the truly harebrained decision Cooper makes in the second act — a moment of unlikely honesty that Shyamalan uses to cheat the plot into a new direction — to the two consecutive scenes of his protagonist/antagonist slipping right past a teeming task force at the moment of apparent capture. Maybe it’s silly to get hung up on the details of a thriller as proudly ridiculous as Trap. But on a scene by-scene level, the movie never makes a lick of sense. The main impression is that Shyamalan had a fun idea, and decided not to let any pesky logistics get in the way. Disbelief can only be suspended so far.

Trap is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page.