'Trap' review: A wildly entertaining father-daughter thriller

Somewhere along the way, M. Night Shyamalan went from a classy, "elevated horror" auteur — "The Next Spielberg," Newsweek called him in 2002 — to a purveyor of cheap thrills. It was the best thing that ever happened to him. Trap follows in the footsteps of the schlockier work he's made in the last decade, beginning with the self-funded found footage thriller The Visit. The film's story is tightly wound around a dopey premise, but it's also buoyed by incredible heart and soul, and seldom slows down while twisting every possible screw. In short, it’s an absolute blast.

Set largely at a pop concert, and featuring narrative zig-zags that stretch incredulity, it's easy to see how Trap might lose viewers eager to nitpick plot holes and logistics. However, that would be missing the forest for the trees. At the movie’s core is a surprisingly layered story of parenthood, which is entirely in service of the kind of thrilling goofiness Shyamalan brought to 2021's Old — a movie whose visual and narrative framing is similarly (and intentionally) off-kilter while remaining utterly committed to sincere melodrama.

Trap is wonderfully good. It might even be great. And if it's not attuned to your sensibilities, chances are, you'll have a hoot of a time regardless.

What is Trap about?

Man, what isn't Trap about? 

In the broadest possible strokes: it's about a well-to-do Philadelphia firefighter, Cooper (Josh Hartnett), who takes his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a show by her favorite popstar, only to discover that the concert is also a trap to capture him — as it turns out, he's secretly a notorious serial killer known as The Butcher.

That's all you really need to know going in, though the film is surprisingly spoiler-proof. Long gone are the days when even Shyamalan's most prestigious works hinged on major reveals — such has been his reputation, even though it's only really happened in three or four of his 16 features — because he's proven much more adept at telling stories with numerous, cascading twists and turns. But perhaps the biggest twist in Trap is that it's a thoughtful father-daughter story at its core. 

Trap is a film about 'girl dads'

As much as its plot concerns Cooper discovering the scale of this police operation, and wriggling through whatever cracks he can find, the reason it feels urgent — and why he can't simply go on the run — is that he truly, deeply cares about Riley. She's been having a tough time at school with bullies and seeing the spark in her eye as she sings and dances means the universe to him. As much as Cooper might want to find a way out of the labyrinthine concert venue, he doesn't want to arouse her suspicions, and he needs to make sure she has a good time too.

Which is to say: if the premise didn't seem loopy enough from the trailers, it's also a girl-dad movie in saccharine, sentimental ways. After all, the pop singer at its center, Lady Raven, happens to be played by R&B artist Saleka (Shyamalan's daughter), who features heavily on screen (not to be confused with his other daughter, Ishana, who directed The Watchers this year). Trap is practically an ode to his daughters and their teenage years, though it also wrestles with some of the darker implications of fatherhood. It plays, at times, like a confrontation of what it means for a daughter to challenge a man's view of the world, and of himself.

During Trap, it's fun to see the uncommon sight of a western pop star of South Asian origin (quite fitting for brat summer, the doing of British Asian sensation Charli XCX), but the inclusion of Saleka is more than just a gimmick. Sure, Shyamalan attempts to highlight her musical talents, but the young singer-songwriter proves a surprisingly key (and radiant) presence, a bastion of aspirational goodness who vitally contrasts with Cooper. Shyamalan casts his daughter as a symbol of absolution, who suggests that her fans hold up their phone flashlights in the name of forgiveness and acceptance — traits Cooper doesn't adhere to when the movie occasionally delves into his backstory. It's a moving meta-text, made all the more tragic by the fact that Cooper is constantly trying to escape Lady Raven's orbit, and willing to make innocent bystanders his pawns.

There is perhaps no more fitting a venue in which to wrestle with casual misogyny than a pop concert aimed at teenage girls, and the film incorporates this idea with surprising subtlety. Cooper is quick to put several young women and girls at the concert in harm's way to create distractions, and he doesn't appear to take Lady Raven very seriously (his ultimate folly, Shyamalan, you old softie). Protecting Riley from bullies may be just as important to him as evading the cops, but he also has a casually violent misogynistic streak. One gets the sense that Cooper might trot out a defense like "as the father of a daughter…" as though it were a get-out-of-jail-free card. 

Trap is a cat-and-mouse game where the mouse has a head start

However, Trap isn't a film of learning moments. It's far too mischievous for something so didactic. Rather, it uses Cooper's relationship to Riley as a kind of rubber band. He often leaves her to enjoy the show while scouting the venue for exits, like some kind of serial killer 007 — it's hard not to root for him each time he pulls off a small heist to slip past security guards. But his role as a chaperone means he constantly finds himself back with Riley no matter how much progress he makes.

The more Cooper's suspicions are aroused by the increased police presence, the more he tries to sleuth out their strategy. It's a cat-and-mouse game where the mouse has a head start (the police don't know what he looks like). Minor characters are surprisingly forthcoming with what they share — in part because he can turn on the charm, but also for plot convenience — and new opportunities to slip out unnoticed seem to arise as soon as existing ones are thwarted. Some of these exit strategies are ludicrous, from Cooper trying to score a backstage pass, to a featured artist inexplicably appearing through an illogically placed trap door (heh).

But Shyamalan has a secret weapon amid all this: the talents of Josh Harnett. 

Josh Hartnett's fine-tuned, operatic performance keeps Trap on track

Trap does for Harnett what Shyamalan's Split did for James McAvoy: both films provide their actors with some truly madcap material that allows them to flex their most unexpected thespian muscles. Hartnett and McAvoy ham it up like nobody's business, but they have so much god damn fun with it.

In Harnett's case, the first layer of this fun takes the form of well-meaning dad jokes and stilted delivery that hints at a kind of pretense. Shyamalan's dialogue has never felt polished or naturalistic, but its floweriness here beats with distinct purpose. It feels robust during fleeting moments of exposition, allowing Cooper to create a detailed roadmap to his origins through implication, and paint pictures of his daily life using words alone. It also creates a sandbox for Hartnett, in which he plays with polite pleasantries and laces them with devious implications, accentuating the character's white, suburban, middle-class façade. The actor wields Cooper’s friendly front with precision, luring other characters in with his charm while winking to the audience. 

Trap is effectively about an all-American father trying, and slowly failing, to maintain a work-life balance, while keeping an addiction to bloodshed under wraps. The film isn't particularly interested in any realistic serial killer psychology, and it's also not concerned with his actual methodology, or any of the salacious tenets one might expect from Dexter or Criminal Minds — trauma, motive, trophies, what have you. However, the film is deeply invested in the mask of normalcy Cooper wears.  

The film circles the question of what fatherhood means for someone who has such horrific, secret impulses, a theme that may as well reflect the desire to create horror movies, as though Shyamalan were turning the camera on himself. However, this self-reflexivity is more of an echo than a linear conclusion. Harnett is far from an avatar for Shyamalan. Rather, he seems to represent Shyamalan's movies — his cinematic essence — which tend to wrestle with beliefs about the world, and about oneself.

Cooper, in the process, embodies the kind of spiritual war Shyamalan's movies have come to fight in the latter half of his career, with works like After Earth, Old, and Knock at the Cabin. These films ask what it would take for parents to protect their children from the world, and from themselves, and Trap is no different. But as thoughtful as it may be, the reason it works like a charm is because it's unrelenting in its use of themes of family and fatherhood as fuel for a genuinely raucous thriller.

Trap is a propulsive visual romp 

As much as Shyamalan is responsible for Trap as its writer-director, an equal degree of credit must be given to cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the Thai maestro behind Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee and Luca Guadagnino's Challengers. Shyamalan's thriller wouldn't be nearly as impactful without Mukdeeprom's visual trickery and his evolving use of space.

When the movie begins, it features a sense of vast, open possibility while framing Lady Raven's performance as a distant feature. Her show is always seen through Cooper's point of view, literally and metaphorically, as something far away, and something he doesn't understand (or really care to). But the film takes surprisingly intimate turns, and contorts geography until it feels like every wall is closing in on Cooper, à la non-stop concert thrillers like Grand Piano and the opera scene in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. Mukdeeprom employs techniques like split diopters to compress space when it feels like authorities are close, and in immediate response, awkward framing with an excess of emptiness whenever Cooper finds some kind of escape hatch. The film practically controls your breathing through its aesthetics, alternating between claustrophobia and a bizarre form of relief, where you find yourself rooting for a guy to get back to his hobby of dismembering innocent people.

Trap is also impeccable in its use of close-ups, which become tighter and more discomforting as the film progresses. Each time Harnett is in frame, Mukdeeprom lights him in ever-so-slightly eerie ways. Nothing feels overtly "wrong" with Cooper, but his eyes feel just a little too obscured by shadow. He feels a little too duplicitous, or a little too asymmetrical, in ways that your brain may only register subconsciously.

Something just feels off, much in the same way cinematographer Michael Gioulakis made each camera movement feel off in Shyamalan's Old. In this case, what's most puzzling is an inescapable stillness that's as alluring as it is uncanny. You can't look away, but you also don't want to. Trap is filled with these opposing dichotomies. At the end of the day, it's about following a serial killer as he finds his way out of a corner like a wounded animal, if only for his daughter's love — until a sly switch in POV turns it tense, tragic, and downright terrifying, both thanks to Hartnett's performance, and thanks to Shyamalan's fable-like approach to perpetuating cycles of bad parenthood.

His masterstroke, however, is that all throughout every thematic and tonal turn, and each gonzo narrative escalation, Trap  remains wildly and consistently entertaining, with laugh-out-loud dramatic ironies that collide headfirst with a sincere father-daughter story in the most fucked up packaging.

Trap is now in theaters.