I’m In the Tank for M. Night Shyamalan

Trap is unrealistic, lacking in thrills, and a stunning example of just how masterful the writer-director’s twistless storytelling can be.

You could make the case that Trap is unrealistic and lacking in thrills. But why would you want to? M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is about a police dragnet to ensnare a serial killer (Josh Hartnett’s Cooper Adams, a.k.a. the Butcher) in much the same way that The Sixth Sense (1999) was a nuanced portrait of a child psychologist, The Village (2004) was a picture of life in an agricultural commune, and his 2023 hit Knock at the Cabin was an account of missionary work — which is to say that, as in all of Shyamalan’s movies, to greater or lesser degrees, plot is just a means to an end. The expected genre elements are there to be subverted or flouted, and believability is not high on his list of priorities.

I saw Trap last weekend and have been thinking about it ever since. I couldn’t care less whether (to name just a few complaints) the dialogue is sufficiently realistic or the portrayal of serial killers or policework is accurate or if Shyamalan spent too much time spotlighting the burgeoning talents of his daughter Saleka, who plays the pop star Lady Raven, at whose concert the police are hunting for Cooper. To me, the movie is a beautiful object unreeling at its own pace and in its own way — a dream just realistic enough that you think it’s real until you realize everything is awkwardly askew. Some films of his that I disliked on first viewing, like The Village and 2006’s Lady in the Water, I now cherish, mainly because with a bit of temporal distance, I can see that the issue wasn’t what they were but what I wanted them to be. I even loved After Earth (2013), which pretty much everybody agrees is bad. In my review, I called it “a moral tale disguised as a sci-fi blockbuster.”

That’s all of his movies, really; you just swap out the part after “disguised as.” Shyamalan makes moral tales in the manner of one of his heroes, The Twilight Zone’s creator Rod Serling, whose work involved overtly clever elements (like a twist ending) that fade from the mind after first viewing and are replaced by deeper pleasures. Take the famous Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder,” which is often summed up as a statement on the subjectivity of beauty but is also a metaphor for life in a racist authoritarian monoculture. (“They permitted a polyglot, accident-bred, mongrel-like mass of diversification to blanket the earth,” yells a piglike leader on a TV in the hospital, “to infiltrate and weaken!”)

Shyamalan’s commercial breakthrough, The Sixth Sense — which was released 25 years ago on the director’s birthday — is likewise more than the sum of its clever narrative devices. It broke through on the basis of its “twist” (be warned that after this paragraph, Trap and every other Shyamalan feature will be discussed in detail, without spoiler warnings), but arguably what drove the movie to a nearly $700 million box-office gross was everything else about it, from the sensitive depiction of recognizable lives in someplace other than New York or Los Angeles (Shyamalan shoots in his home city of Philadelphia and/or Pennsylvania whenever possible) to the fantasy that a purehearted child, Haley Joel Osment’s Cole Sear (who plays King Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone in a school play), could hear the secret stories of the wronged dead and help them get justice and escape purgatory. It’s also a piece about getting so wrapped up in work that you lose perspective: Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) obsesses over helping little Cole because he feels guilty for failing the patient who shot him and for letting his wife, Anna, feel that he put her second to his career.

None of Shyamalan’s other movies are solely or even mainly about a sequence of plot events. Nearly all are at least partly about how suffering can turn a person into a constructive or destructive force, depending on what else their lives contain. Malcolm’s devotion to his profession in The Sixth Sense is a means of retreating from the truth of his existence, but he helps Cole recognize why he was put on the earth (another recurring Shyamalan theme is people discovering their hidden purpose) and use the skills he learned from being around Malcolm to help the man confront certain truths about himself (starting with the fact that HE’S DEAD). The apartment complex in The Lady in the Water is visited by a water nymph, or narf, who is fated to be brought to a higher plane of existence by an eagle, but only if she can avoid the attacks of the scrunt, a wolflike creature made of grass; the hero, the superintendent, tries to assemble a team of prophesied helpers, including “The Healer,” a role he initially assumes must be played by someone else until he figures out it’s him (he’s been healing the building and its various inhabitants all through the film and he used to be a doctor; of course it’s him). He ascends to a higher plane of his own when he confesses the depth of his despair over the murder of his wife and child.

Sometimes, Shyamalan’s figurative or symbolic tendencies can be old-fashioned in a problematic way. The so-called Unbreakable trilogy, consisting of Unbreakable (2000), Split (2016), and Glass (2019), got in trouble for metaphorizing mental illness: Samuel L. Jackson’s paraplegic, fragile-boned villain Glass is motivated by a desire to learn whether there’s somebody out there who’s as nigh indestructible as he is brittle, and the title character of Split was fractured into 23 identities by horrendous childhood abuse. That’s why, after he manifests the Beast and goes on a rampage, he spares the movie’s heroine, who is a survivor of sexual abuse by her uncle and went on to become a cutter. The diagnoses in the films are as DSM-accurate as the rage of the Macbeths or the title character of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck — or, if you prefer, as accurate as the physics in After Earth or the scientific explanation of what happens to people visiting the beach in Shyamalan’s 2021 horror-mystery Old.

Who cares about its relative believability? There’s a ghost in The Sixth Sense who can’t open a locked door but can throw a rock through a window.

At their most intricately imagined and immaculately executed, Shyamalan’s films have the sting of a parable and the contradictions of the Mahabharata. Consider The Village, whose ruling patriarch is a Bruce Wayne who retreats instead of fighting: He responds to the murder of his billionaire dad by starting a walled community in the Pennsylvania woods, nestled within a wildlife preserve, modeled on 19th-century agrarian life, held together by a mythology of monster attacks, and protected from outside discovery by bribing the federal government to prevent flyovers. Edward is karmically punished for his hubris and manipulations when the fiancé of his blind daughter, Ivy, is stabbed nearly to death by a developmentally disabled young man who was secretly in love with Ivy, necessitating sending her on a journey over the wall to fetch lifesaving medicine. The twist at the end (it was the 21st century the whole time!) is pure Serling, but it’s less important than the script’s other takeaways: Crime happens in every community, and walls and gates are not the answer; an illusion of safety can be purchased with lies, but they will contort those who live inside them (The Village was written and shot in the aftermath of 9/11 and released a year after the US invasion of Iraq).

Who cares about its relative believability or internal consistency? There’s a ghost in The Sixth Sense who can’t open a locked door but can throw a rock through a window. To buy into the plot of The Village, you have to believe that nobody in the title community has ever needed to leave the village before. The Visit is another “found-footage” horror movie that turns into a conventionally edited horror movie after a certain point, complete with crosscutting; it’s so tense and unnerving, and so plugged into what its protagonists, a young brother and sister, are feeling, that you probably forget that the movie is violating its own formal conceit.

Shyamalan is not just making narrative features. He’s working very close to his subconscious, making films that play more like remembered and reconstructed dreams with a level of meta-humor and self-awareness. The Visit is as much of a film about a child-prodigy filmmaker as Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, and The Lady in the Water — which, no kidding, I think is not only misunderstood but one of Shyamalan’s richest and most beautiful films — is embedded with so much commentary on the tropes of commercial screenwriting and mainstream film criticism that it becomes a commentary on how “savvy” viewership can rot the brain and deprive viewers of visceral and emotional pleasures. But his reflections on filmmaking and spectatorship (or, for that matter, his little IMDB in-jokes, like hiring Hayley Mills, star of Disney’s original The Parent Trap, to play an FBI profiler coordinating the trapping of a parent) never overwhelm a production to the point where it fails to do justice to its characters and their stories.

I saw Trap at a packed theater in Dallas where viewers were leaning forward in their seats, looking and listening rather than scrolling their phones, mesmerized by Shyamalan’s ability to cast the right actor in the right role and let them move through a series of situations that are viewed mainly from their perspective. Until a third-act change of perspective, Trap is told from the point of view of Cooper, even in the concert scenes, where the camera views the performances from the vantage point of Cooper and his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) on the arena floor and (briefly) backstage. Much of the film’s peculiar energy comes from the way Hartnett’s smug but anxious serial killer interacts with people who don’t know he’s the target of the dragnet.

I came away from it thinking not of realistic procedurals like Zodiac but examples of a subgenre that critic Anne Billson memorably dubbed “the preposterous thriller,” where things that simply could not happen occur regularly, and the entire tale unfolds with the feverish matter-of-factness of a nightmare. Gone Girl, Basic Instinct, and a lot of Alfred Hichcock and Brian De Palma filmographies count as preposterous thrillers. Something about Cooper’s self-satisfied thrill-seeking energy reminded me of Hitchcock’s Rope, loosely modeled on the famous Leopold and Loeb case and set in a party at a thrill-kill duo’s apartment where the buffet table is an antique trunk containing the body of a murdered classmate. I also came away from Trap thinking of Basic Instinct, another movie filled with things that simply could not happen, ever, and that, like Trap, is built around a killer who is pretty close to a demon or devil figure and gets a charge out of seeing how suspiciously she can behave without ending up in the back of a squad car (as when Cooper stumbles upon a room full of police officers and walks right up to the front, pretending to be a stadium employee servicing the beverage table).

There’s a pervasive air of unreality from the start, mostly centered on Cooper’s façade of “normalcy” that he wears like a store-bought Halloween mask. He’s so much the stereotypically rugged but pleasant straight white male suburban father that he’s like an alien in a science-fiction satire passing for human, or a transplanted Russian agent in an espionage movie pretending to be a Regular American. And there is also, to quote one of my favorite phrases from the movie Bob Roberts, a whiff of sulfur about him. In scene after scene of Trap, characters blatantly hand Cooper information that can help him escape without realizing he’s the person the police came there to apprehend. It’s as if Cooper has the innate ability to compel people to blurt out secrets.

There are never any mustache-twirling villains in his work, only individuals warped into antagonists of society, but whose motives are understandable once they’re articulated.

When the film moves into its final third, the already-thin tether to reality snaps and we’re squarely in dreamland, or Hitchcockville. Would a massive police operation to capture a Hannibal Lecter–level homicidal genius allow for in-the-moment improvisations that could compromise security, such as Cooper wrangling backstage invitations for him and Riley to meet the performer Lady Raven and get closer to the rear exit that’s the only way out? Would a performer like Raven, who’s presented as a superstar and thus eminently kidnappable, be allowed to leave a concert with two people nobody in her entourage had met previously and without mentioning them to her security detail? Probably not. But I don’t think we’re supposed to be interacting with the film on those terms, any more than we’d judge the scene in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter escapes a maximum-security facility by murdering a guard and wearing his face as a mask or the scene in the Martin Scorsese remake of Cape Fear where a detective hired to guard the Bowden family household fails to notice that the housekeeper has been replaced by Max Cady in a dress and wig.

The bad guys in the latter films, not coincidentally, are both depicted as being as close to nonhuman as an antagonist can get without crossing over into supernatural horror: Cady hangs beneath a moving car for hours, and Lecter is such a silver-tongued devil that he can hypnotize a man into biting off his own tongue. Cooper is part of that tradition. At times, he seems to owe a bit to Michael Myers (another is-he-or-isn’t-he-a-demon) in the original Halloween, with Mills’s profiler as the pursuing Dr. Loomis and Lady Raven stepping into the main story line as a purehearted, self-sacrificing Laurie Strode type who is mainly interested in protecting women and children against a secret bogeyman. Halloween, of course, owes a huge debt to Psycho, and both films are referenced and conflated in Trap, which gives Cooper a backstory of a domineering mother who recognized his destructive nature when he was very young.

But there’s empathy for this devil here, as there always is in Shyamalan’s thrillers. There are never any mustache-twirling villains in his work, only individuals warped into antagonists of society by accidents of birth or personal experience, but whose motives are understandable once they’re articulated. (“Do you know why you’re afraid when you’re alone?” asks Vincent Grey, the patient who shoots Malcolm at the start of The Sixth Sense. “I do. I do.”) Glass’s epic, outer-directed self-loathing and Kevin’s (played by James McAvoy) toxic desire to control every aspect of his shabby, neglected life are relatable even when the characters loom as threats. Edward, who gaslighted the younger generation in The Village, got the idea for his project while attending group counseling for the bereaved. Covington’s elders all possess locked boxes containing reminders of the violence that drove them from the city and into the country, where there’s also violence.

Along those lines, Trap turns out to be as much of a story of a deeply damaged social misfit embracing a caricature of normalcy as Don Draper on Mad Men. The closest Cooper gets to a deep realization is when he registers that as long as he kept his public life as a model employee, husband, and father separate from his secret life as a jailer, tormentor, and murderer of strangers, his life had a pleasing equilibrium, but once he crossed the streams, it was all over. As fascinated as Shyamalan is by matters of nature and nurture, he also demonstrates a pre-20th-century belief that evil is a force, not just an idea, and it can possess people, even good ones. When Dennis channels the black-eyed Beast and starts crawling up walls like a housefly, we don’t yet know that we’re watching a film set in the comic-book-infused Unbreakable universe. But we accept it in-the-moment, if we’ve seen other Shyamalan films.

You know the Maya Angelou quote, “’People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”? It explains why I’m in the tank, so to speak, for certain storytellers, Shyamalan being an example here. I love the craft and vision that certain artists bring to every project, the themes and motifs they revisit, and most of all how their work makes me feel — in Shyamalan’s case, unnerved, bothered, occasionally disturbed, but somehow at the same time open-hearted and delighted and inspired.