In “Trap”, the latest film from M Night Shyamalan, former teen-heartthrob Josh Hartnett plays Cooper Adams. He is a seemingly congenial family man and firefighter who accompanies his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the concert of the pop superstar Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan). Early into the concert, though, Cooper’s hackles are raised by the extreme police presence. The police are looking for ‘The Butcher’, a serial killer who they expect to be in attendance and who we soon learn is Cooper.
This information is conveyed early on. Even the trailers and promotions for “Trap” have front loaded this complication. For most of the 105 minutes running-time of “Trap” we follow Cooper as he tries to evade capture both in, and outside of, the concert while trying to avoid the suspicion of his daughter. The film is never wholly wonderful, but it’s a prickly and delightfully strange film that I suggest you see before reading a word further. Although “Trap” is not as spoiler-prone as Shyamalan’s most famous works, it’s still enjoyed best without any knowledge of where it goes.
There’s an ostensible hook about the value of family in the set-up for “Trap”. The dichotomy the film provokes is intriguing: even a nihilistic serial killer still has a love for his daughter. But early moments in “Trap” immediately begin to unsettle the idea of Cooper as a man torn between good and evil. And as the film goes on – hewing close to its perspective – the story reveals itself as perversely charming, although I keep wondering how much of this is Shyamalan’s intention. Broad-strokes of “Trap” suggest a film that wants to comment on family-life as the thing that proves one’s humanity, and yet “Trap” earns its most thrilling sequences from its disinterest in proving that there is goodness in Cooper, or even the world at large.
Riley’s presence, front-loaded in the film and increasingly incidental as it goes, feels key to this. The trip to Lady Raven’s concert is a reward for her good grades at school. It also functions as a kind of salve for some difficulty at school. Through early conversations we learn that Riley has been subjected to latent bullying from some girls at her school. For a lot of the first act of “Trap” Cooper must believably convey fatherly attentiveness while attempts to outwit the police find him leaving his seat continually. It turns a lot of these sections into a comedy of sorts as he must create increasingly convoluted reasons for his absence, while Riley breathlessly watches Lady Raven on stage. There is an awkwardness to Hartnett in these sections, that the film benefits from. He cornily teases Riley like a doting dad, makes a mess of using teenage slang and is generally embarrassing in a loving kind of way but there’s a vacancy in Hartnett’s cadence that immediately makes this feel more like a mask than a hidden part of him. As the concert goes on, and despite the narrative insisting that Cooper’s fatherhood is important to him, the relationship feels more superficial than sincere. It’s a superficiality that works for “Trap” in a strange way.
Late in the concert, while constructing a lie to evade police, Cooper has a conversation with a spotter at the concert. The spotter is played by M. Night Shyamalan who gushes about Lady Raven, his niece, and her work. As Shyamalan stares out on stage at his niece (played by his real-life daughter) it’s hard to tell if it’s performance or reality that’s responsible for the intense adoration on his face. It’s a look of love, sincere and earnest. It is, perhaps, the single genuine moment of sincerity from one character to the other in “Trap”, and in many ways it seems to emphasise the deliciously nasty streak of misanthropy that runs through the entire film. The people in this movie, with the exception of that adoring uncle, are rarely presented with sincerity. For the most part, Shyamalan presents them with ambivalent distance.
Serial killers and other persons of disrepute evading capture are a staple in film. Few of them leave the do-gooders surrounding the sociopathy as colourless as “Trap” does though. In “Trap”, humanity is not worth saving. In fact, it is not even worth genuine attention. It’s the film’s strongest sleight-of-hand that keeps the audience tautly waiting for the other shoe to drop even as we realise, the more it continues, that we’re not so much rooting against Cooper as we are just excited to see where it goes because none of his foils are compelling enough. The film takes a turn when Lady Raven begins to play a larger role in it. In writing and direction, I suspect Shyamalan intended for it to be an even-handed struggle of wits when the plot heightens, but in performance, Saleka Night Shyamalan is too vacant to compel. In a strange way, the airless performance only works to heighten the way that no character, outside of Hartnett’s sociopath, feels compelling on screen. “Trap” treats them either like buffoons, or as flat characters. Haley Mills and Alison Pill appear in significant roles, and despite their importance to the plot the film seems disinterested in considering the humanity of either of them even as it promises, but does not deliver, on considering the responsibility of family life in sociopathy.
In some ways it feels like a lost bit of thematic framing for the film. A version of “Trap” which hyper-focuses on the father-daughter relationship could offer a sharper reading of parental ambivalence, but “Trap” is weak on family. The clue that Cooper’s own mother, who appears in shadowy visions, was key to his psychopathy feels tired and inorganic and cleverer as a call-back to Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” than a natural part of “Trap”. Shyamalan is succeeding on Hitchcockian intrigue in the best moments, but little in “Trap” feels meaningfully engaged in the question of family or even in true character study of a sociopath. We don’t necessarily understand Cooper, we just don’t care much about the people in the world he saunters through. It leaves Pill, who appears in the second half, saddled with a role that asks too much and offers her too little to play on. The camera, disconnectedly moving through the family home, seems dispirited with the allure of normalcy. Like us, it knows that there’s no earnest interest in care or socio-family dynamics. If the family is part of the story here, it is only as a sign of more entrapment.
“Trap” saves a series of swerves for its final act, some more successful than others but all of them industriously working on keeping the excitement taut even if logic and emotional stakes feel less so. Helpfully, Hartnett gets better in these less precise sequences. A late-film monologue across a dinner table gains a lot of cachet from the way Shyamalan shoots it but also in the way Hartnett avoids the expected histrionics as his character becomes more cornered. Even better is the very final wordless sequence of the film which is both surprising and not and owes as much to Shyamalan’s knotty sense of jokes as it does on the way Hartnett is clearly excited to bite into the offbeat malevolence of this man.
“Trap” might not make much sense, but it is at its delightful best when it casts off any expectations of morality. Sometimes it’s good to watch a man be bad. It is telling that one of the few characters who the moving camera seems to treat with care is Jamie, a vendor at the concert who unwittingly helps Cooper to plan an escape. It is Jamie who first tells us of ‘The Butcher’ as he excitedly speaks of the killer’s obsession with butchering his victims. For Shyamalan, and Jamie, the perverse things are more intriguing than the banalities of normal life. Maybe that’s Shyamalan’s own indicting of us, and our thirst for the macabre. Who can say? What I do know is that “Trap” is at its delicious best the more misanthropic it gets.
“Trap” is currently showing in theatres.
