Trap (2024)

½*/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw I try sometimes to put myself inside the mind of the creator, to imagine the route they took to the art they made. Maybe M. Night Shyamalan was at a concert, looked around, and imagined what it would be like if everyone there was searching for him. How he would have trouble blending in, but someone who looked like, say, Josh Hartnett, might have an easier time of it. He kind of took a run at this with the football game in Unbreakable, right? But why would Night imagine people were looking for him in the first place? Did he want that? Did he want the discomfort of being recognized in public, the struggle and obligation to be magnanimous towards strangers while remaining present for his family? Was the sacrifice of it appealing, a chance to display unusual charm and grace and build on the self-mythology he started in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED reporter Michael Bamberger’s hilarious, bathetic The Man Who Heard Voices, which begins: “Night’s shirt was half open, Tom Jones in his prime.” Not Henry Fielding’s fortunate foundling, for sure, but the Welsh sexy beast notorious for the amount of ladies’ lingerie tossed in his general direction on stage. Maybe Night was feeling the burden of being semi-famous in a specific location that night at this theoretical concert. Maybe he was feeling the burden of not being more famous.

I think Shyamalan has chops, and I think that, for the most part, he squanders them in the pursuit of films that are only puzzle boxes. The conservative ideology that fuels most of his stuff is as reductive and regressive as his devotion to the notion of an O. Henry twist stripped of irony and invention. A twist for twist’s sake. A scarecrow without a field. He has given us some sharp insight into family dynamics, with his best work–The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, even parts of The Village, Old, and Signs–demonstrating a disarming empathy. Yet the longer he goes on, the more it becomes clear that he’s not telling fairytales full of archetypal wisdom–he’s manufacturing actual kid lit: primers for new readers à la Clifford or The Magic School Bus designed for parents to read out loud in funny voices and donate in bulk after they’re inevitably outgrown. His latest high-concept exercise is Trap, in which doting dad Cooper (Hartnett) takes his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a Taylor Swift, er, Ariana Grande, er, “Lady Raven” (Saleka Shyamalan) concert in a commendable act of daddy/big-girl time. But lo, what’s the deal with all the cops? Turns out, the fuzz has received an anonymous tip that serial killer The Butcher will be attending the concert. They presume this because they find a torn ticket receipt at one of The Butcher’s safe houses, and I’m going to guess they were careful to double-check that it didn’t belong to one of his victims. I don’t know that there’s another filmmaker whose films I want to pick apart as much as I do Shyamalan’s.

In North by Northwest, ad-man-on-the-run Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) spends an illicit night on a train with a lovely lady and disembarks the next day right under the noses of the police looking for him by dressing up as a Pullman porter. The problem? In 1959, Pullman porters were predominantly Black. The detail doesn’t trouble me (nor does the ridiculous plan to kill Thornhill in a cornfield with a cropduster), because North by Northwest is neither boring nor tedious. You could Neil deGrasse Tyson pretty much anything to death, though you only tend to want to when the movie is either so lugubrious it invites the mind to wander or such a howler it defeats any good faith attempt to suspend disbelief. I realize Hitchcock is a high bar, but as he’s the filmmaker to whom Shyamalan was frequently compared (including by Shyamalan himself), well. With Shyamalan, there is, for me, the added incentive of wanting to let the air out of projects that are arrogantly nonsense–that is, collections of outlandish, impossible-to-reconcile events the maker expects the audience to swallow because their message has import that supersedes, to their mind, the need for their bucket to hold water. Signs is like that: the story of naked aliens for whom water is battery acid arriving on a planet that is mostly water to harvest animals that are mostly water. Lady in the Water is like that as well. There, Shyamalan murders a film critic with a grass dog and casts himself as the author of a new Bible. I have it in for Shyamalan because his movies exude self-importance without doing the work. I like pretentious films. I don’t like pompous ones.

Every plot point of Trap is a logic-sieve. Every conflict is contrived. Every broad, obvious, lunkheaded revelation is explained in exquisite detail, as a child might to a recalcitrant pet–as if speaking slowly and carefully will help the senseless suddenly make total sense. When some people show up where they shouldn’t be, standing around like idiots after escaping from somewhere they couldn’t have been imprisoned so easily, Cooper monologues, “I locked them in Riley’s room. There’s a window and a nearby tree. I never looked at this place through their eyes. I never let the two lives touch.” All of that blather is gaslighting an audience into believing there was ever a plan, and if that used to work for Shyamalan, it doesn’t anymore. When a clown has a single trick, eventually you figure it out and get sick of it. It’s also fair game to talk about Shyamalan’s daughters now: one made the Shyamalan clone The Watchers while the other is inserted into this mess to play, in extreme close-up, one of two polarities in ceaseless rotation. Have you seen those Chinese face-changers on New Year’s? Imagine one with two masks flipping back and forth and back and forth and forth and back just to sex things up a bit. Shyamalan positions the camera inches from her face, her giant, watery, carefully lit eyes serving to distract from her largely inexpressive face and flat line delivery. At some point, Robert Rodriguez started to let his kids collaborate on his once-interesting films, too, and, look: Father of the Year is mostly incompatible with the best artistic decision-making. An ironic lesson, you’ll agree, in a film about another dad of the year who turns out to be a sociopath with a god complex.