‘Trap’: Review

Dir/scr: M. Night Shyamalan. US. 2024. 105mins

Beware the wolf in sheep’s clothing — or, in the case of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, a serial killer who, to all the world, appears to be just another mild-mannered suburban father. Josh Hartnett plays a dad taking his teenage daughter to her favourite pop star’s sold-out concert, only to discover that the show is an elaborate sting operation by law enforcement. As usual, there’s an appealing sense of play to Shyamalan’s unpredictable, teasingly preposterous execution as this mass murderer tries to elude the authorities. But the film’s chief weakness is Hartnett, who never quite lands on a compelling way to play a man whose two separate lives come into conflict over one intense day.

Fumbles the potential cat-and-mouse intrigue

Not screened for reviewers in advance of its release through Warner Bros., Trap should do solid business, despite heavy competition from the record-breaking blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine. Hartnett has enjoyed a career resurgence thanks to his acclaimed supporting performance in Oppenheimer, but Shyamalan’s auteur clout, paired with a nifty high-concept hook, will be the picture’s principal draw. 

Cooper (Hartnett) is a kindly Philadelphia fireman escorting his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a daytime concert for music sensation Lady Raven (played by the director’s own daughter, burgeoning singer/songwriter Saleka Night Shyamalan). Riley is ecstatic about getting to see Lady Raven perform, but the doting Cooper seems a bit distracted by all the police and security around the stadium. Soon, Cooper learns that the last-minute show has actually been staged to ensnare The Butcher, a violent local serial killer whose identity remains a mystery. Alarmed, he must figure out a way to escape, and to keep anyone – including his family – from discovering that he is The Butcher.

Hartnett portrays Cooper as an aggressively unassuming man, the sort of uncool dad that loves his daughter but does not know much about popular music or hip slang. But once his horrible secret is revealed to the audience early on — he’s monitoring one of his captured victims through a live feed streaming to his cellphone — Cooper’s anodyne demeanour takes on a more sinister air. Hartnett weaponises the character’s aw-shucks friendliness, his placid expression occasionally dropping so that we get a glimpse of his menacing side.

In Cooper, Shyamalan has dreamed up his showiest, most disturbing character since James McAvoy’s multiple-personality villain from 2016’s Split. Similarly, Trap’s antihero is meant to be a fascinating riddle, with Cooper fighting to keep his bloodlust separate from his outward persona of a good father and husband. (Alison Pill, who appears later in the picture, plays Cooper’s unaware wife Rachel.) But Shyamalan and Hartnett struggle to fashion a convincingly layered murderer whose mental unravelling and inner anguish are sufficiently captivating. Instead, the performance is a muddled melding of serial-killer types audiences have seen before. Hartnett neither encourages us to recoil from this monster or be drawn in by his sinister genius as he stays a step ahead of law enforcement.

To be fair, the writer-director hurts his star’s cause by fumbling the potential cat-and-mouse intrigue inside the concert. Shyamalan strains to concoct reasons for Cooper to keep abandoning his increasingly-suspicious daughter and wander around looking for possible exits. Lucky for Cooper, he consistently encounters the most trusting or naive individuals, who are conveniently tricked into giving him crucial information or are oblivious to him stealing, say, a walkie-talkie so he can overhear the police’s plan to find The Butcher. Trap infrequently gives us moments in which Cooper’s brilliant quick thinking adds to the film’s twisted pleasure — instead, everything comes a little too easily, which lessens the stakes and the fun.

Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a frequent collaborator of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Luca Guadagnino, shoots on 35mm to give this spectacle-driven concert the appropriate scope and grandeur. Even when the tension goes slack, Trap wrings some drama out of the juxtaposition of this eye-popping show and Cooper’s much more intimate dilemma. There’s even an element of dark comedy weaving through the story as Riley and her fellow Lady Raven stans passionately sing along to her melodramatic love songs — utterly unaware of the ruthless killer in their midst. 

In his recent work especially, Shyamalan has demonstrated a willingness to veer off in a completely different direction in his films’ final reels, provocatively changing location to disorient the viewer. That tendency holds true with Trap, which finds a surprising new venue for Cooper’s last stand. The switch is unexpected and intriguing, although it too is undercut by Hartnett’s blah killer. The audience is told just how vicious this mass murderer is, but the performance is disappointingly bloodless.