What if a horror film were also a concert film? That's the premise of Trap, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan, which stars the filmmaker's daughter, R&B singer Saleka Shyamalan, as a pop star performing her own original songs. While it might be tempting to write this off as a case of nepotism, the Shyamalan family is undeniably talented, and the writer-director père's films are hit-or-miss but rarely boring. For me, the prospect of seeing one-time screen heartthrob Josh Hartnett play a devious serial killer was enough reason to catch this movie.
Middle-aged dad Cooper (Hartnett) brings his 13-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a concert as a reward for her good grades. While Riley shrieks at the sight of her pop idol, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), Dad gamely tries to keep up with the teen slang ("This show is crispy"). Their bonding is so adorable that a merch vendor (Jonathan Langdon) befriends Cooper and tells him the big secret of why the concert is swarming with cops: It's a sting operation to catch notorious serial killer the Butcher, who left a ticket receipt in one of his haunts.
That's a useful tip for Cooper, who is the Butcher. (This is no spoiler: Early in the film, we see him duck into the restroom to check on the live video feed of a captive [Mark Bacolcol] he has locked in a basement.) Now the killer will need all his ingenuity to emerge intact from the giant, crowded, bopping trap that profiler Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills) has designed to nab him.
Shyamalan's scripting and storytelling rarely live up to his high-concept premises, but he has enough of a penchant for experiments that I'll always give him another chance. Serial-killer stories told from the perpetrator's point of view are nothing new (see below), but they're not typically about the cat-and-mouse game that ensues as the authorities close in. The first half of Trap focuses tightly on that pursuit, confusing all our expectations for a thriller. We know we shouldn't be rooting for Cooper to escape. But we can't help it, because he's in the protagonist position, his perspective our window on the world.
As long as the movie stays inside the concert venue, it combines the real-time tension of a good terrorist thriller (think the early days of "24") with the absurd contrasts of a dark comedy. Although Cooper isn't directly menacing the concertgoers, the screaming crowds, his oblivious daughter and the onstage spectacle make the situation into a pressure cooker of overstimulation.
Hartnett gives the role his all, marrying the affable-everyman qualities of Jason Bateman to the glassy eyes and frozen grins of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. As serial-killer dads go, he's not as chillingly inconspicuous as Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu in The Vanishing, but he's entertaining. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom helps by lighting Cooper's eyes to look demonic and pulls out other tricks — split-diopter shots, unusual perspectives — to keep us attentive.
But things fall apart in the final act, when Trap moves out of the arena and out of Cooper's sole perspective. His escape needs to be audacious, and it is — but also so implausible that the characters begin to feel more like chess pieces being moved around a board than human beings. Alison Pill (as Cooper's wife, Rachel) and Saleka Shyamalan give pathos-inducing performances, yet the whole situation feels so manipulated that it's difficult to feel for anyone caught in Cooper's destructive wake. As for Mills, she's wasted as a background figure.
The more we learn about the dark contents of Cooper's psyche, the less menacing he is, when the opposite should be true. Like James McAvoy's character in Shyamalan's Split, Cooper is more a collection of actorly tics than a believable psychopath. While a good PG-13 horror thriller can frighten us while leaving most of the gore and violence to the imagination, nothing kills the dread like the pop psychology explanations we get here.
Luckily for us all, Shyamalan has gotten past the point in his career where audiences expected him to top himself with a more shocking twist in every movie. Trap has the requisite thriller convolutions — nothing mind-blowing, nothing embarrassing (Signs, I'm looking at you). It's a serviceable B movie. By the end, however, the point of view has changed so many times that we have whiplash, and the only real suspense is over whether the film will end on a note of life-affirmation or cold perversity. Like Lady Raven's pleasant but generic pop ballads, the answer to that question is hard to feel passionate about.
In a Violent Nature (2024; rentable): Want to continue exploring the perspective of serial killers? How about an undead one? Director Chris Nash put a new spin on the slasher film with this recent release.
The Minus Man (1999; Starz, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Or try out this vintage noir item in which Owen Wilson plays a man who drifts into a homicidal lifestyle, also starring Janeane Garofalo. More thrillers from the killer's point of view include Maniac (two versions), The House That Jack Built, Angst, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Shyamalan's own Split. (Warning: Most of these are way more graphic than the gore-free Trap!)
The Sixth Sense (1999; Max, rentable): A viral sensation in its time, Shyamalan's beautifully crafted breakout film is still worth rewatching.