Josh Hartnett squirms and plots through M. Night Shyamalan's perfectly thrilling Trap

For the first 10 or 15 minutes of Trap, Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is in dad-joke heaven, and writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is right there along with him. Cooper is taking his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the sold-out concert of pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan, the filmmaker’s daughter) as a reward for a strong report card. Riley hasn’t quite reached the age where she’s fully, irrevocably embarrassed by her sweetly dorky father, which means he can get away with light teasing and joshing attempts to learn her slang—in between questions about her social life that evince a genuine and touching concern for her well-being. With all the awkward besweatered sincerity and sweetly arrhythmic cornball father-daughter chatter, Hartnett suppressing all traces of his former teenage cool, Shyamalan couldn’t be more in his element if the arena turned out to be haunted.

It’s not, but Cooper is, even as fusses over his daughter’s well-being. He may not be all that enamored of Lady Raven’s music—it’s heavy on the mid-tempo semi-bangers; pleasant, but not exactly Olivia Rodrigo or Taylor Swift-level cross-gen appeal—but he does his best to stay present and in the moment, perhaps aware that Riley will need a little capitulation to make up for attending the show with her dad, rather than friends (even if he scored halfway decent floor seats). Of course, Cooper, like most dads, is only human, and can’t help himself from occasionally glancing at his phone—not for the news, or the score of the big game, or whatever the kids are calling Twitter these days, but to keep an eye on the man he’s holding in the basement of some undisclosed location. Because Cooper is also a local Philadelphia serial killer called The Butcher—and Lady Raven’s show is also, improbably but just go with it, a massive sting operation. Law enforcement has figured out that the Butcher, whose identity remains a mystery to them, will be at the concert, and they’re hoping to make escape from the building near-impossible.

Cooper has been correctly profiled by a supposed expert (Hayley Mills, who knows a thing or two about parent traps) as a relentlessly crafty fellow, and indeed, much of Trap involves watching Hartnett squirm and plot his way out of a big location that has turned into an extremely tight spot, made tighter by the fact that he has his daughter in tow. Appropriate for a filmmaker who loves the art of the self-cameo, it’s a Hitchcockian scenario—only in Shyamalan’s version, it’s not a regular man thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but a genuinely guilty killer. Call it a Right Man thriller.

Though his diehards will insist that even some of his supposed disasters have elements to recommend them (and they wouldn’t be wrong!), Shyamalan has revitalized his later-period career by going small: limited locations, intimate casts, Twilight Zone ideas executed in under two hours. That was actually true of his earlier genre movies, too, but it’s more obvious and pronounced in rigorously blocked and shot exercises like Old, A Knock At The Cabin, and now Trap—which further strips down the family dynamics of his last few pictures into something both slippery and agile. Working with Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and shooting on celluloid, Shyamalan constantly emphasizes the size of the venue and Cooper’s position in it without relying on many conventional wide establishing shots. Some of his techniques are relatively simple, like how Lady Raven’s performances are seen almost entirely from Cooper’s vantage. This means there’s no concert-movie swoop-ins intercut with the audience-level action, a limitation that has a subtle psychological payoff in later scenes. Elsewhere, the film uses extreme foreground and background action or overhead shots to make us search the frame for Cooper as he schemes for a way out. The camera is positioned with such a purposeful mix of disorientation and clarity that some shifts in audience point of view—for the initial stretch, we’re very much invited to identify with Cooper, despite his misdeeds—feel more surprisingly natural, and less jarring, than they should.

For all his formal rigor and ambition, Shyamalan adheres, sometimes rigidly, to genre convention. As with Old, Trap reaches a point where it could easily depart its mouse-and-cat reversals and thriller mechanics in favor of something trickier, stranger, and more profound. There’s a deep well of sadness underneath the twitchy-fun premise—in trying to figure out how, exactly, Cooper plans to keep squaring his wholesome love for his daughter with his apparent compulsion to murder (and desire to escape). Hartnett plays this conflict perfectly, suggesting less of a façade and more of a well-rehearsed but maybe not quite perfect compartmentalization, long before Cooper brings up the subject in dialogue. It’s not exactly that Shyamalan opts out of that thorniness entirely, the way he sometimes appears weirdly attached to the doctor-led explanation of the last few minutes of Psycho. He just seems a little bit reluctant to follow the father-daughter part of his story to its own discrete conclusion—whether tragic, twisted, or some oddball other thing. To his credit, Shyamalan doesn’t try to make Cooper into a cuddly monster, while admitting in interviews that he identifies with the guy anyway, trying to parent his daughter from the correct distance. Yet there are times when it feels like he’s more comfortable staring into Cooper’s psychological abyss (and his unflagging resourcefulness) than stepping back for a broader view.

That’s in keeping with the filmmaking, at least, and maybe Shyamalan means for that tension to remain unresolvable; maybe that’s part of what gives Trap an eerie, uneasy power despite not invoking the supernatural touches Shyamalan is generally known for. Despite the lack of superhumans, ghosts, or ladies in the water, there are times when Cooper feels a bit like the James McAvoy beast and Bruce Willis hero from the Unbreakable trilogy, struggling to inhabit the same body, all while attempting to keep his daughter happier and healthier than he is. On one level, Shyamalan feels more comfortable than ever; Trap may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in his last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can’t, and probably shouldn’t, ever get out of his system.

Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, Alison Pill
Release Date: August 2, 2024