Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trap’ on VOD, in Which an Inspired Josh Hartnett Carries Another Love-it-or-Hate-it M. Night Shymalan Endeavor

Trap (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is classic M. Night Shyamalan: Destined to be divisive. It’s either so ludicrous that you’ll love it, or so ludicrous that you’ll loathe it. Bottom line, it’s ludicrous – and a rollercoaster ride that sorta mirrors our experience with Shyamalan’s twist-riddled Hitchcock-derived thrillers. He brought us in with The Sixth Sense, rewarded us with Unbreakable, saw his cred crash with turkeys like The Happening and After Earth, brought us back with The Visit and Split, disappointed us with Glass and Old, and showed us a slightly refreshing newish side of himself with Knock at the Cabin. So are we up or down on Trap? Let’s find out – and the film’s contribution to the HARTNETTAISSANCE had me at “up” before I pressed play.

TRAP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is dadding so hard right now. Pop superstar Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) is playing tonight, and he’s taking his early-teens daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the really big show. She’s so over the Moon for this, she’s all the way around the Moon and back over it again and then on to Mars. There’s some half-assed subplotty chatter about a falling out between Riley and her friends, and I think that’s why her dad is her date. And boy, is he up for it. Enthused, smiling big and goofy, buying snacks, buying merch, encouraging her, just experiencing the joy through his daughter. Many dads would be gutting it out and rolling their eyes and folding their arms and wincing amidst the din of the screaming teenies. But not Cooper. Dad of the frickin’ year here.

As Lady Raven KILLS IT up on stage, Cooper looks around and notices an unusually large security presence. Like, swaths of heavily armed and armored SWAT types. Occasionally, uniformed officers snatch a guy from the crowd. Curious. At this point, I suggest you strap on a five-point harness, because the contrivances are gonna make things real bumpy from here on out. Cooper leaves Riley in her seat multiple times under the pretense of using the bathroom or fetching a T-shirt, etc., so he can snoop around and figure out what’s going on around here. He asks a merch vendor what the deal is, and the guy spills a vat of beans so big it could feed millions: This entire Lady Raven show is a trap. Authorities know that a serial killer dubbed The Butcher – notorious for cutting his victims into pieces – is attending the concert, so they’re gonna turn the arena into a temporary police state and nab him. Isn’t that wild? Putting 20,000 unwitting people at risk in a massive public venue in order to arrest one incredibly dangerous individual? With cops carrying machine guns lining the aisles and none of these starry-eyed Lady Raven lifers are going to question it? Damn.

Cooper’s response to this is oh wow! on the outside. On the inside, it’s more oh shit! because the last thing he wants is to get caught for his heinous crimes. He manages to do some amazing things like worming his way into employees-only areas to eavesdrop on police as they strategize, creating a distraction by causing a small explosion in a concession-stand fryer, stealing a radio so he can eavesdrop on the FBI profiler’s (Hayley Mills) conversations, etc. He even lucks into finding Lady Raven’s uncle (M. Night Shyamalan), which he hopes affords him an opportunity to exit from a backstage door. By now, buying into all this is a bit like trying to swallow a sperm whale whole. But are we still interested in seeing how it plays out? Yeah, I think so. Against our better judgment. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The psychological elements of Trap reveal that Shyamalan still holds Hitchcock’s Psycho in great reverence. The filmmaker also said his original pitch was “The Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift show.” But the 2024 movie that truly carries the ugly blackened heart of Silence of the Lambs is Longlegs, which is likely to emerge as the year’s horror champion. 

Performance Worth Watching: Hartnett. He’s utterly hilarious in this movie, fully committed to camping out, embracing the deep silliness of playing a split-personality superdad who’s secretly a bloodthirsty maniac. 

Memorable Dialogue: A tour manager dishes out a doozy of an ironic observation to Cooper: “Your daughter’s never gonna forget tonight!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Many things can be true at once: Trap is aggravating, entertaining and reasonably suspenseful. It’s as incredibly stupid conceptually as it is excellent in its visual execution. It’s shot and edited with rigor and precision, and sloppily written, plausibility seemingly never crossing Shyamalan’s mind. This is his style now, a method he’s honed for 25 years. It’s his attempt to be the heir to Hitchcock’s master-manipulator throne. You could poke a couple dozen holes in this flimsy- ass plot, easy, half of them during the conclusion, which is nonsensical garbage. Driving us crazy is Shyamalan’s M.O., and asserting that he’s doing it on purpose isn’t that big of a theoretical assumption. Maybe he’s great and maybe he sucks, but at least he’s not boring.

One thing that may separate Trap from his lesser work is its playfulness. Shyamalan’s always indulged grim comic irony, but this film seems ever-so-slightly aware of itself, especially in Hartnett’s performance; he all but winks at the audience as Cooper works to compartmentalize his binary selves (“Never let the two lives touch,” he mutters to himself at one point), and thinks fast on his feet, as if enjoying the cat-and-mouse game of evading capture. Hartnett is clearly having fun, and we sense Shyamalan is too chuckling with glee as he piles up one ridiculous contrivance after another, imagining his audience laughing at all this silliness, or being enraged by it.

As ever, it’s easy to sum up a Shyamalan film as an exercise in ego. Trap does exactly that, with the added, potentially grating nepotism of Shyamalan casting his aspiring pop-singer daughter as an arena-packing superstar (Saleka penned all the songs in the film, and her father more than occasionally pushes them to the forefront). Aside from the mechanics of Shyamalan’s storytelling is a frustrating truth about many of his films: They so frequently seem to be about little more than themselves and their filmmaker’s desire to play the audience like, I dunno, a didgeridoo (Hitchcock wanted to play the audience “like a piano”; Shyamalan is rarely so subtle). There’s a moment in Trap that satirizes some of the macabre fascination with true crime – Coopers merch-booth buddy expresses a weird almost-admiration for The Butcher, saying, “I’ve been following him for all 12 victims!”, like he’s been a Springsteen fan since Greetings from Asbury Park. The film doesn’t have much else to say, but perhaps this bit follows a parallel notion that many of us have been following Shyamalan for his last 14 films, whether they’re great or good or bad or terrible. Maybe we just like being provoked.

Our Call: I was really teetering on the fence throughout Trap – it was comical, it was godawful, it was tense, it inspired eyerolls within eyerolls. But the very funny final shot might’ve made it worth working through all the flapdoodle. So STREAM IT, I guess.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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