The Macabre Ironies of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap”

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Some movies dispense symbols subtly, like crumbs on a backwoods trail, but in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, “Trap,” there’s one symbolic idea, and it’s unleashed with the subtlety of a thunderclap, reverberating throughout the film with relentless intensity but scant variety. I doubt whether the idea is one that Shyamalan would admit to, or whether he even intended it. Nonetheless, it’s what gives this movie more of a kick than does any manifest aspect of its tightly assembled and essentially inhuman plot: family life is murder.

The title of the film is, in one sense, bluntly literal. Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), a firefighter from a suburb of Philadelphia, is taking his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a pop concert at a local arena. It’s soon revealed that Cooper is holding a young man captive in a basement; that the arena is swarming with police and surrounded by a SWAT team led by an F.B.I. profiler, Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills—fittingly, the star of the original “The Parent Trap”); and that the target of this intensive manhunt is a serial killer known as the Butcher. The man they’re after is identifiable not by name or face but by tiny details that the police must be on the lookout for—and he is, of course, none other than Cooper himself. The action involves Cooper’s efforts to give Riley a regular sentimental father-daughter outing while also eluding capture. It’s a story of double evasion: he must take surreptitious measures to throw law enforcement off his trail, and he must do so in a way that doesn’t break the façade of ordinariness that he sustains for Riley’s benefit.

The apparent normalcy of Cooper’s relationship with Riley is conveyed through embarrassment and inadequacy—his desperately flailing effort to be a cool dad. He tries to speak the lingo, saying “jelly” for “jealous,” and, when asking her the slang meaning of “crispy,” tries dorkily to improve on it. Riley is a good student (the outing is a reward for her grades), but she’s being ostracized by other girls, which has led to tensions between Cooper and some other parents. Though Cooper seems delighted to be spending quality time with Riley, it’s obvious that the music of the concert’s headliner, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan, one of the director’s daughters, who wrote several songs for her character to sing), isn’t exactly to his taste. As the concert progresses, Cooper’s increasingly bold and risky evasive maneuvers force him to dash off frequently from his seat, which suggests his aversion to attending the concert at all.

The whole story of “Trap” is on Wikipedia, for those who want spoilers. The general essence of it is the double life of Cooper Adams: his all-consuming effort to live a cheerful, ordinary life—as a father and husband with a constructive career and an admired place in the community—while also committing heinous and gruesome acts. A sense of his macabre bloodlust comes when an arena employee named Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) unwittingly tips Cooper off to the sting operation and refers to one the Butcher’s victims as having been “deli-prepped.” Cooper maintains a series of houses—in addition to (yes) the Adams-family house—in which he carries out his gory schemes. He could as easily be a bigamist, even the father of alternate families, except for what actually goes on in those houses. At home, he is a frustrated geek of unimpeachable virtue, but, in this hidden realm, he becomes the Butcher, a painstakingly constructed secret self that is his truest identity, or the one that he needs most ferociously. (There’s a fascinating tell midway through the film, a nervy lie on Riley’s behalf that he’d never have uttered were it not part of his escape plan.) Cooper enacts, as the Butcher, more than simply murder—his crimes involve intricate ruses and elaborate expertise, turning his banal life into a thrilling, high-risk adventure.

Since most criminals seek to avoid arrest, most crime stories are ones of deception, false identities, double lives. This is, of course, central to the most illustrious of all serial-killer movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” which Shyamalan grafts onto “Trap” by way of Grant’s profile of the Butcher, in which she diagnoses a pathological relationship with his mother. Sure enough, Cooper intermittently hallucinates an elderly woman and her voice. It’s an effortful bit of psychologizing, plainly cooked up just to squeeze in a nod to Norman Bates’s motivating pathology, but, more significant, it’s also a red herring, albeit one that Shyamalan likely didn’t even intend to create. Positing a mother complex as Cooper’s motivation shifts viewers’ attention from one that’s hiding in plain sight: the commonplace horrors of a mundane family life. (If you think Riley’s been picked on before, wait till the other kids find out that her father’s a serial killer.)

“Trap” is a movie of two kinds of action. Shyamalan realizes one of them expertly: the action of the eye. The story is centered on gazes—on Cooper’s quick perception of chances to take, escape routes to exploit—and the director captures these sight lines with virtuosic relish. The arena’s spaces almost become characters in themselves, and the large part of the movie that’s set there is an inspired windup toy of mechanical possibilities.

But, as cinematic gazes go, the ones in “Trap” are also ones without subjectivity. Even when they present, unambiguously, a character’s point of view, they don’t conjure an inner life—the object of the gaze dominates the subject, in part, because those objects are instantly reduced to their function in the plot, whether in Cooper’s machinations or in other characters’ pursuit of him. “Trap” offers little sense of larger-scale observation, of scanning, of the wide spaces in which Cooper operates, and amid which he zeroes in on the salient possibilities for escape. The film presents the immediate effects of Cooper’s arachnid scheming but rarely conveys the feeling that he’s thinking at all. For as long as the drama stays in the arena, the venue becomes effectively the protagonist and gives the movie energy. When the action eventually propels Cooper outside the confines, that energy dissipates.

To give the tightly mechanical plot a semblance of life, Shyamalan fills it out with piquant details: there’s Cooper’s pally rapport with the attendant Jamie (which enables him to steal the guy’s employee badge, and then use it to steal another employee’s documents and snag a police walkie-talkie); there are awkward chance encounters with the mother (Marnie McPhail) of an ex-friend of Riley’s. The backstage world of Lady Raven’s show affords more of this: another musician (Kid Cudi) throws hissy fits over his snacks, a concert-tour employee (Vanessa Smythe) reveals details of stage management, and there are notable protocols and practices involving law-enforcement officers. What all these bits of local color have in common is that they show ordinary people as dupes, and Shyamalan, in depicting a world deceived by Cooper’s pretenses, also reveals one deceived by its own self-importance. Like Cooper, Shyamalan confidently sees through the vanity. His vision is a sardonic one, and it feels as if his cinematic smirks conceal rage at the impotence and banality of which ordinary life is made. The film’s ironies aren’t cosmic—they’re the tantrum of an inhibited man who only cautiously reveals a lurking sympathy for the Devil. ♦

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