Director/Screenplay – M. Night Shyamalan, Producers – Marc Bienstock, Ashwin Rajan & M. Night Shyamalan, Photography – Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Music – Herdis Stefansdottir, Songs – Saleka Night Shyamalan, Visual Effects Supervisor – Javier Marcheselli, Visual Effects – Cantina Creative, FuseFX (Senior Supervisor – Tommy Tran), Lola | VFX (Supervisor – Edson Williams), Ollin VFX (Supervisor – Isaac Camacho) & Pin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Will Towle), Special Effects Supervisor – Mike Innanen, Production Design – Debbie De Villa, Choreographer – Cora Kozaris. Production Company – Blinding Edge Pictures.
Cast
Josh Hartnett (Cooper), Ariel Donoghue (Riley), Saleka Night Shyamalan (Lady Raven), Alison Pill (Rachel), Hayley Mills (Dr Josephine Grant), Jonathan Langdon (Jamie), Marnie McPhail-Diamond (Judy’s Mom), Scott Mescudi (The Thinker), Russell ‘Russ’ Vitale (Parker Wayne), Vanessa Smythe (Tour Manager), M. Night Shyamalan (Spotter), Mark Balocol (Spencer)
Plot
Cooper takes his young teenage daughter Riley to a concert held by pop star Lady Raven in downtown Philadelphia. Unknown to anybody else, Cooper is a serial killer that has been nicknamed The Butcher. Talking to a concession stand employee, Cooper discovers that police have had a tipoff that The Butcher will be at the venue. They are using the concert as a trap and are scouring every person in the stadium. A behavioural profiler is even on hand. Cooper searches every avenue of exit trying to find a means of escaping the trap.
M. Night Shyamalan is the ultimate love him or hate him director. Shyamalan gained a huge boost with the sleeper hit of his third film The Sixth Sense (1999), which came with one of the all-time great twist endings. People were excited about the Shyamalan name through his next films Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002), but were starting to turn off the big Shyamalan conceptual twist ending by the time of The Village (2004) and Lady in the Water (2006). Shyamalan’s next few films, The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013), suffered some terrible reviews. Shyamalan seemed to find redemption by teaming up with Blumhouse and working on their medium-sized budgets to make The Visit (2015) and Split (2017), which gained him the best notices in a decade, less so with the Split sequel Glass (2019). His next films Old (2021) and Knock at the Cabin (2023) have generally been positive in their reception.
2024 marks the year in which the Shyamalan children make their names visible to the wider world thanks to his promotions. Two months earlier the same year, we had the release of The Watchers (2024), a really good directorial debut from Shyamalan’s middle daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan. With Trap, we are introduced to his oldest daughter Saleka. I commented at the time of The Watchers that Shyamalan seemed an unapologetic (or unaware) proponent of nepo baby syndrome – the critique made that the children of celebrities seem to get a lot more breaks in the entertainment business than those who have to work their way in the door from the ground up. The usually mononymic Saleka is not quite in the rarefied stratosphere that her counterpart Lady Raven is and has so far only released one studio album Seance (2023) and served as support act for other bands. Saleka is an R&B singer, which is not really a genre that I am a fan of so will leave commentary on her musical output to those more in the know than I.
Shyamalan says he conceived of Trap as “The Silence of the Lambs (1991) taking place at a Taylor Swift concert.” On the other hand, in terms of depicting a film where the main locale for almost the entire show is a concert venue, it feels as though Shyamalan himself has not attended many rock concerts. Everything from dealings with venue staff to the ease with which Josh Hartnett is able to steal badges, access backstage or fool the star’s astonishingly naive-seeming support crew (a cameoing M. Night Shyamalan) into thinking his daughter is a leukaemia survivor and get her taken on stage seems absurdly improbable to pull off for just one individual.
Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and daughter Ariel Donoghue at the concertLady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) in concert
It was this constantly stretched implausibility that left me with difficulty engaging with Trap. Even more so, it is a film where M. Night simply has not researched basic police procedure about a situation or hired the usual police advisors you get on a film. Things like the ridiculousness of the police imparting their plan to minimum wage concession employees or giving a detailed breakdown of the behavioural profile they are searching for to the singer. Or simple things like shooting on a limo with machine guns where it is surrounded by a crowd. Even of taking Josh Hartnett away and leaving him in the back of the van unsupervised. As with a bunch of films that followed the mould of The Silence of the Lambs, Josh Hartnett is a genius killer who is constantly outwitting the police with his brilliance and even superior physical and fighting skills – like the absurd ability to get up and physically down riot gear outfitted officers seconds after being multiply tasered. I also kept wondering – given that it is later said there was no other evidence at the house the ticket was found – how exactly they were planning to identify he was The Butcher amid a crowd of several thousand people.
You can accept some far-fetched improbabilities in a story – they are often the foundations of good drama. On the other hand, when an entire story, like the one we have here, is founded around a constant line-up of such improbabilities then you have difficulty engaging with it. The concert scenes are okay-ish. Shyamalan does have a distracting way of shooting many of the dialogue scenes in closeup with actors directly facing the camera. Watching it on the small screen, it looks like an ungainly tv episode shot in widescreen.
Where Trap started to work for me was in about its latter third where we leave the concert behind as Josh Hartnett reveals himself to Saleka and persuades her to take the two of them out of the venue in her limo and she subverts this by suggesting that they go and visit his home. The manoeuvring around between Hartnett and Saleka with each trying to gain an advantage without tipping their hand to daughter Ariel Donoghue or his family has an amusing adeptness. These scenes do reveal that one drawback – that Saleka is not much of an actress. She’s okay when playing the mega-star but the scene with her and Hartnett in an ordinary car where she is trying to gain a psychological advantage over him by playing his “mommy” just falls flat. Actually the best scene in the film is the one that comes right at the end where Josh Hartnett evades capture and returns to wife Alison Pill and the scenes of quiet confrontation where she talks about her suspicions.
