Trap (2024)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Screenwriter: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill, Hayley Mills, Jonathan Langdon
M. Night Shyamalan is, in many ways, the archetypal 21st Century studio auteur. His work is largely concept driven – centred around the type of ideas marketers and executives can rest assured their money is safe with – and is built around narratives with so many story beats that accountants are able to establish exactly what their company’s money is going towards and why. Trap (2024) is one such film, and the latest from this one-time master’s apprentice turned misunderstood or overrated (depending who you ask) filmmaker. It’s an intriguing scenario presented with hints of the director’s very best work that holds the same fundamental issue as everything else released under his name in the past 20 years: a distinct lack of logic and a consequential struggle to provide immersion.
Shyamalan isn’t the only filmmaker whose work takes leaps in logic and who openly manipulates their audience by simply ignoring rules regarding perspective (the eye through which we engage with the story), but he is unique in the mainstream space for how often he asks his audiences to read into his film’s perspectives. To head into a Shyamalan release is to ask “what is the twist? What is the trick?” and the texts themselves work hard to establish questions for us to ask and, ultimately, to pursue the answers to. Post-Signs, which was released in 2002, M. Night Shyamalan’s feature films have been like Schroedinger’s Cat: ideas that inspire critical engagement but are ultimately incapable of answering the questions raised.
Trap is by no means the filmmaker’s worst offender in this regard, but it comes during a time in which general audiences are more primed for engagement. The big budget studio offerings of Marvel have made Easter Eggs, and thus the pursuit of further meaning, part of our cultural arrangement with cinema, while other studios have paid reference within their own IP library and beyond in everything from Barbie to Fast and Furious. Even Quentin Tarantino, a world leading filmmaker of non-franchise films, has been engaging with this self-referential practice for decades. Shyamalan should, then, heed the lessons learned by JJ Abrams on ‘Lost’ and Star Wars: The Force Awakens; those being to not establish questions for which you do not hold the answers to.
Trap’s big idea is: what if a serial killer was set up to be caught at a live concert? 20,000 people imprisoned in a massive arena seems like a high-risk and complex way to catch a seemingly motiveless serial killer, but don’t think about the concept too much (even if the writer-director is asking you to do so at every turn). It’s an idea that gets butts in seats – it’s Dexter (‘Dexter’) at a Taylor Swift concert – it’s suspense and murder and blood and psychopathic behaviour through the eyes of a serial killer, ala True Crime podcasts; it’s directly on the nose of popular culture.
Josh Hartnett is a magnetic lead, his return to the limelight of Hollywood studio films a true victory for the masses. Early worries of an inability to make stilted, exposition-heavy dialogue seem convincing is rectified by a third act performance that proves the earlier moments to be an acting choice that attempts to highlight the character’s detachment from humanity and alert our instinct to the abnormal. In retrospect, it’s a genuinely terrific turn; one that proves itself worthy of the time and attention Shyamalan gives to it.
The presentation is of a generally high quality, too. Shyamalan’s much-discussed directorial trait of cutting to a first-person perspective is given meaning here, these shots growing in importance as the story progresses, while concert scenes prove to be both realistic and immersive. There is way less violence than you might expect of a story with such a scenario, but Shyamalan is closest to his apex when presenting the tension of character interactions on a purely visual basis.
Like earlier summer hit Longlegs, Trap is insistent upon integrating an investigative element into its story without providing the text with the depth needed for priming the audience in such a way. Here, we are asked how the “good guys” of the FBI and various SWAT teams are going to take down our villainous lead character, or how Hartnett’s killer is going to escape, while in Longlegs we were asked to ponder what is making people act in such violent and seemingly contradictory ways. Longlegs took shortcuts in its camera choices and the lead’s lack of general dialogue; restricting our view even when it wasn’t consistent with the perspective our lead character had. Trap is more directly attached to Hartnett’s killer, and as such the shortcuts are more obvious; the scenario is immediately weaker, the choices each character makes are more nonsensical or narratively convenient, the dialogue is more obviously expositional. Each are guilty of forcing us to look in one direction rather than the other, instead of giving us the entire picture and trusting that its filmmaking is strong enough to encourage us to look where it hopes we’ll look (as is the case with The Sixth Sense), but Longlegs was able to establish an atmosphere becoming of such a directly manipulative tone, while Trap was not – you could even argue that the whole point of Longlegs was to explore manipulation as a concept, while Trap has no such excuse.
Despite M. Night Shyamalan’s one-word title and concept-heavy idea, Trap is not Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. It doesn’t even all take place at the concert. It is, instead, closer to Longlegs. But, unlike its fellow original horror/thriller, it does not hold the status of a low-budget film or the work of an up and coming filmmaker, and ultimately offers less from a thematic perspective, engaging with meaning only on the most surface level. Trap is engaging, and not a film you’ll likely grow bored with – it may even find a dedicated audience courtesy of its music (from M. Night’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan) and generally good lore-building – but this isn’t a classic like the early Shyamalan pictures, nor is it amongst his good-not-great selection that includes Split.
Score: 10/24
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