M. Night Shyamalan's first two 2020s movies were unquestionably made as direct responses to a world rattled by COVID-19. Both Old and Knock at the Cabin were grim projects following characters isolated from the rest of the world coping with the inescapable specter of death haunting families. Old especially evoked the days of COVID lockdowns with its younger characters wistfully talking about how they'll never get to experience events like prom or graduation. Meanwhile, Knock at the Cabin had its leads watching as the world unraveled through their television set, much like all of us frantically checking and rechecking COVID-19 statistics on our phones in August 2020. These were brutal thrillers channeling the apocalyptic vibes and inescapable mortality informing the earliest years of this decade.
By contrast, Shyamalan's latest feature Trap is a respite from those earlier titles. After his immersion into darker projects ruminating on how death comes for us all, Shyamalan wants to do something more enamored with dark comedy. This isn't a title about family units gradually succumbing to mortality. Instead, Trap is meant to make audiences go "ooooooh!" at big plot developments and revel in its silliness. Shyamalan's post-2022 excitement even extends to Trap's central locale of a concert. With COVID filming restrictions eased or outright eliminated, this filmmaker can finally shoot interior crowd scenes again! He doesn't have to confine his actors to a beach or cabin anymore! These qualities offer something new for 2020s Shyamalan. They also inform a movie that's entertaining more often than not.
Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) on the surface looks like a normal dad, especially with how excited he is to take his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see pop star sensation Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). While at the concert, though, Cooper notices a lot of police and extra security systems in place. Cooper quickly realizes that the FBI knew that local serial killer The Butcher was going to be at this concert and they've set up a trap here to catch this monster. Little does anyone realize that Cooper is actually The Butcher and he's not going down without a fight. As he tries to ensure Riley has the best day ever at Lady Raven's show, this psychopath also does everything in his power to throw the authorities off his trail. The Butcher is cornered, but he's not down and out, not by a long shot.
Shortly after Cooper discovers this movie's titular "trap", he returns to his seat with his daughter. Suddenly, right in the aisle next to them, a trap door opens and a "surprise" fictional singer appears. This entrance remains open for an inordinate amount of time, which inspires Cooper to suggest to Riley that they should head down there and explore the stadium's underground area. During every second of this exchange, I could only think to myself "there's no way they'd place that trap door there." Just creating a sudden giant void in a crowd of screaming fans with no guardrails in sight, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen! It's a totally preposterous element of Trap's universe. It's also one of those distinctively ridiculous elements only the writer/director behind "you know what gets a bad rap? Hot dogs" and the character name Mid-Sized Sedan would conjure up.
Trap's greatest ridiculous moments contain enough of those idiosyncracies to register as charming rather than lazy or irritating. Making the innate silliness of the proceedings go down easily is the darkly humorous atmosphere. Some of Shyamalan's worst movies are total dreary slogs like Lady in the Water or After Earth. Here, dashes of grim zest pop up throughout the runtime playing on Cooper being Hannibal Lecter in disguise as Ned Flanders. A sight gag involving a side character unassumingly handing this man a pair of box cutters, for instance, is quite amusing. A later set piece involving Cooper watching over a crowd of police getting a brief on The Butcher is similarly humorous.
These jokes and all of Trap work especially well thanks to Shyamalan's precise visual sensibilities. Working with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Trap's camerawork isn't afraid to linger on a shot or engage in deeply precise blocking. After a summer of so many stagnantly framed blockbusters, it felt good to see a split-diopter on the big screen again! Especially interesting in the camerawork is how Shyamalan often just plops viewers into the POV of Cooper without any foreshadowing. It's a great abrupt trait that immediately sets you at unease. Are we being put into his eyeballs because some carnage is about to unfurl? It's a terrific subtle detail. There's also a third-act gag involving the camera swerving to the right to emphasize a piano that's so perfectly timed (shout-out also to editor Noëmi Preiswerk on that front). The 35mm images of Trap go a long way to making this such a fun cheeky outing.
Even with all these virtues and an impressively bravura Josh Hartnett lead performance at its back, Trap is still, ultimately, a messy movie in some key respects. This is a feature thriving on recurring Shyamalan traits like detailed camerawork or well-structured suspense sequences. It also, unfortunately, succumbs to recurring problems scattered throughout his filmography. Trap's final 30 minutes, for instance, ehco Old in lathering on too much exposition that answers questions the audience likely doesn't care about. Meanwhile, Shyamalan's former go-to composer James Newton Howard (the duo last worked together on After Earth) is still deeply missed. Herdís Stefánsdóttir's, reuniting with Shyamalan after Knock at the Cabin, compositions aren't bad, they just lack an extra dose of oomph. Her tracks tragically can't evade the lasting sonic legacy of Shyamalan and Howard's greatest collaborations on films like Signs and Unbreakable.
Most frustratingly, this is yet another Shyamalan movie with a disabled villain. This time, Cooper is defined heavily by his OCD. Following Unbreakable, The Visit, Split, Old, and other films, Shyamalan's employment of "disabled=villain" is so predictable and that's the one thing a thriller can never afford to be. Trap is clearly imperfect, but it's also a hoot to watch unfold. Even as an Old defender, it's fun to witness Shyamalan in a better and lighter mood with his latest feature. Trap isn't exactly a chart-topper, but it's still a cinematic melody with some incredibly fun flourishes.
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