Trap ★★★★★

Released: 9 August 2024

Director: M Night Shyamalan

Starring: Josh Hartnett

Another year brings us yet another M. Night Shyamalan feature. It has been a pleasure seeing the genre maestro work his magic for the past few years, consistently reinventing himself through sharp formal experimentation and increasingly timely horror stories. While both Old and Knock at the Cabin felt downright apocalyptic in their post-pandemic search for humanity, Shyamalan’s latest cinematic self-reflection looks at a collectively healed world – and one, in which the filmmaker attempts to probe his fatherhood anxieties. Trap is a film of deceptive humanism and painstaking love for those we wish to protect. Trap is also a film about a psychotic serial killer with an affinity for bodily mutilation, whose day out with his daughter might end up being his last.

Even by the abnormally high Shyamalan standards, the premise here is absolutely killer: a serial killer protagonist stuck in a Hitman-esque setup? As M. Night himself points out, it’s essentially “The Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert”, which is a very apt comparison… only with a healthy dose of Shyamalan’s empathetic storytelling. When we first meet Cooper (Josh Hartnett), the film positions him not only as a protagonist – M. Night shows him as a loving father, who seemingly just wishes to fulfill his fatherly duties. Even in the tiniest gestures (like holding his daughter close during the fan gathering and fending off the mother of her school bully) there’s a semblance of humanity to the character who would otherwise be depicted as a monstrous subhuman. Just like with his previous works, Shyamalan’s autocritical nature shines through: he sees a fraction of himself within Cooper, and that fact is further solidified by the introduction of the film’s second lead, Lady Raven (played by M. Night’s daughter, Saleka), whose concert escalates into the eponymous trap.

Despite what his naysayers might proclaim, M. Night Shyamalan’s work has always been eerily prescient: just this week, we’ve heard about the cancelled Taylor Swift concerts on account of possible attack threat. Swift’s audience famously leans young and female – something near and dear to Shyamalan, a father of three daughters. While Cooper might be a grade-A psycho killer, there’s evidently few things more important to him than his daughter’s well-being. Josh Hartnett is the perfect fit for this role, as his perpetually pensive eyes are now switching between the two lives Cooper so carelessly tried to keep separate. At one point, he watches his daughter as she’s joyfully dancing on stage, and the only feelings radiating from behind those focused eyes seem to be enormous pain and regret. That’s where the film shifts gears: what starts off as a cat-and-mouse thriller from the POV of the killer takes a sharp turn once Cooper realizes the charade is over – he’s no longer in control.

As per usual, the formal qualities on display here are some of the most unique and inspired directorial choices you may find in contemporary mainstream cinema. M. Night’s latest is lensed by Apichatpong’s frequent collaborator, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and it’s quite possibly the most fascinating pick he could make for a contained thriller like this. Sayombhu’s photography has always been nothing short of extraordinary when it comes to shooting with natural light, but in Trap he gets to experiment with LED screens and phone torches in the middle of a pitch black stadium. The result is stunning: a split diopter lens sneaks up on the viewer with remarkable emotional weight, overhead shots of crowds add increased tension to the close-quarters manhunt, and Shyamalan’s signature close-ups and whip pans make for a suitably claustrophobic experience.

The latter half of Trap shall remain a secret for those excited for yet another Shyamalan twist – the entire bait-and-switch combination here is one major narrative turn that completely shakes up the flow of the film. Without revealing anything, let’s just say things get significantly more suspenseful (and violent) once the facade of mercy gets traded for Cooper’s killer mode. M. Night is clearly having a blast in this playground, slowly unravelling motivations and toying with the audience until the very last sequence – after all, it’s his unique power to hold the viewer in the palm of his hand. Trap is the sort of communal experience you can only get from a filmmaker of this calibre, and nobody does it with as much respect for the theater audience as Shyamalan.