Chris Duncan
Trap immerses us in an enormous concert in downtown Philadelphia. Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to an afternoon performance by the uber-famous Lady Raven, played by Saleka Shyamalan, M. Night’s musician daughter, in one of the most entertaining examples of nepotism you’ll find. He soon learns that the concert is, well, a trap, meant to catch a serial killer dubbed “The Butcher.” The twist? Cooper himself is the Butcher.
The film unfolds like an intense series of challenges Cooper has to overcome with various forms of trickery. He’s not carefully orchestrating a plan and executing; he’s been caught off guard, and needs to figure things out on the fly. He tries out different escape routes, checking the roof, trying to convince his daughter to climb down into tunnels with him, and so forth. It’s a nice, fun, almost tongue-in-cheek cycle in which you might lose track of how many times you think “surely he can’t get himself out of this.”
The concert setting is far more than just background music, too. There’s a very elaborate show that Saleka Shyamalan is putting on for the majority of the film; her performance is dramatic and fun, and her original music is compelling, catchy pop that feels very contemporary.
Trap is, as a piece, very contemporary too. It does this carefully, without dating itself with overt references to specific phenomena, short of cameos from pop culture figures. Cooper discusses slang with Riley—specifically, the made-up (I assume) term “crispy”—and an unnamed social media platform plays an important role. It’s current, then, without feeling like it has an expiration date.
Not many filmmakers are interested in telling stories that take place in undeniably current times, maybe out of fear, maybe out of lack of understanding, maybe out of sheer disinterest. Shyamalan may not fully understand the ways of young people, but he isn’t afraid of them, and he’s certainly interested in them— and so, too, is Cooper seemingly sincerely interested in his daughter’s life.
The elder Shyamalan shared on Twitter before the film’s release that Trap adhered to a “cinematic rule” requiring that “you could never get closer to the concert stage than the characters. If they got closer, then you got closer.” The director also shared in a recent interview that it took him abandoning his original intention to shoot Trap in 4:3 aspect ratio to understand the real bones of the film: “It’s him in juxtaposition to his environment that makes it fascinating,” he says of the concert, and Cooper’s place in it. Instead to using the tighter 4:3 frame to force a an overriding sense of claustrophobia, Shyamalan chose a wider 1.85:1 to emphasize Cooper and his immediate surroundings—the aforementioned juxtaposition between the cold-blooded Butcher and a screaming crowd of starstruck young girls. The film mines levity and tension alike out of it.
There’s something darkly comic in being an observer, not just of someone who we know to be a serial killer, but someone who acts so comical, so ridiculous, and being the only one who seems to notice. That is most of Trap’s entire schtick—until it isn’t. There’s a tension between our perception of Cooper and that of everyone around him—until there isn’t. That tension, when to heighten it, and when to release it, is like a trick that Shyamalan keeps up his sleeve. He keeps an audience guessing, and knows exactly how to keep them under his control.
Shyamalan often places the camera squarely in front of Hartnett, having him communicate one thing with words and something else with his eyes, smile, laugh, and body language. He roams the crowd, causes distractions, searches for escape routes, assesses the threats in front of him. He has hallucinations of his abusive mother, and even discovers an eerily similar-looking FBI profiler leading the whole operation (Hayley Mills), listening to her on a stolen walkie-talkie. He does all of this while also keeping his daughter content, buying her things and going to increasingly absurd lengths to both make her happy and engineer his escape.
It’s all very entertaining. Trap is certainly one of Shyamalan’s lightest films of late, a welcome change of pace as a follow up to the dourness of Knock At The Cabin and the existential dread of Old. Trap, importantly, also does well to approach itself with earnestness, using its absurdity to deepen its impact rather than dull it to being the butt of a joke.
Cooper says, at one point in the film, something to the extent of “never let the two lives touch,” recited like a mantra, in reference to his double life as a family man and serial killer. Of course, Cooper’s circumstances make breaking, or at least stretching, this rule necessary, and Trap’s suspense only deepens as the lines between Cooper’s two lives begin to blur. It shows that it’s more than just its own highly Hitchcockian premise; it asks just how far Cooper can go without having these two lives come crashing together and crashing down. The film wants Cooper to decide, in essence, which life he can’t live without.
