Trap (2024)

Written, directed and produced by M. Night Shyamalan. Stars Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills and Alison Pill. Saleka (Salahkah) plays Lady Raven and also wrote, composed, produced and performed the concert music; Shyamalan says she created 14 original songs for the film. The thriller score itself is by Icelandic composer Herdís Stefánsdóttir.

The reported production budget was about $30 million. It opened to $15.45 million domestic, eventually making $42.78 million in North America and $83.68 million worldwide — roughly 2.8× its production budget in theatrical gross.

The premise

I actually really like the concept of Trap. It’s pure high-concept Shyamalan: a serial killer takes his daughter to a pop concert only to discover that the entire building has become an elaborate police trap designed to catch him.

And that’s really been Shyamalan’s game throughout his career. We talk about the twists, but even The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs are enormous concepts treated intimately. The Village, Split, Old — he creates these slightly unreal worlds governed by one big idea.

The problem with Trap isn’t necessarily the idea.

It’s that Shyamalan may be the wrong director for his own movie.

This thing needs to MOVE

Shyamalan is a filmmaker of anticipation. He loves slow camera movements. He loves pauses. He loves watching the realization of something slowly dawn on somebody.

That’s fantastic in The Sixth Sense. It’s fantastic in Signs. It works in The Village.

But Trap needs fucking Michael Bay.

Not literally Michael Bay — but Michael Bay’s instincts. Cut. Move. Escalate. Don’t give me enough time to realize how fucking ridiculous any of this is.

Instead, Shyamalan tries to legitimize the premise with procedure. Here’s the perimeter. Here’s how they’re screening people. Here’s Hayley Mills profiling Cooper and telling everyone what he’s likely to do.

And because Shyamalan lets everything breathe, I have plenty of time to start asking why any police department would do this.

If Rachel gave them enough information to connect the Butcher to this concert, why wouldn’t you surveil the house? Follow Cooper? Catch him somewhere controlled?

Why are we conducting the world’s largest game of Guess Who with 20,000 concertgoers?

Josh Hartnett — and the twist Shyamalan wastes

I really like the initial subversion with Hartnett.

We meet this doting dad taking his daughter to a concert. He notices all these cops. He’s getting nervous.

And because he’s our protagonist, we’re nervous for him.

I think Shyamalan reveals Cooper is the Butcher too soon.

Give me 25 or 30 minutes believing this guy is in danger. Let me wonder what he’s hiding. Then reveal that I’ve spent the first act rooting for the fucking serial killer everybody is trying to catch.

Now you’ve trapped me.

And then the second act becomes morally complicated because I’ve already developed an attachment to him.

Hartnett has enough natural likability to make that possible, although I’m not convinced he has enough dramatic weight to maintain it once the movie reveals what Cooper is.

But Cooper really does love Riley

This is where Hartnett works best.

His relationship with Riley sometimes feels weirdly infantilizing — Cooper occasionally talks to this teenager like she’s eight years old.

But there’s a moment backstage where he watches her having this incredible experience with Lady Raven, and Hartnett absolutely sells something the movie desperately needs:

This psychopath genuinely loves his daughter.

One doesn’t invalidate the other.

And Shyamalan has confirmed that’s intentional. Riley is essentially the emotional center of the movie. Cooper’s problem isn’t merely escaping the police. It’s escaping while preserving his daughter’s belief that he’s her loving father.

That’s fascinating.

Give me more of THAT movie.

The concert is GOOD

I’m probably going to disagree with Mike here, because I imagine he’s going to beat the shit out of the Lady Raven stuff.

I think it’s one of the best things in the movie.

Saleka Shyamalan absolutely convinces me she’s a pop star when she’s being a pop star. The music works. The guest performers work. The lighting works. The crowd works. It actually feels like a real concert.

And apparently they worked their asses off to accomplish that.

The problem isn’t Lady Raven performing.

The problem is when the screenplay decides Lady Raven needs to become Clarice Starling.

Once Saleka has to carry the thriller outside her musical performance — confronting Cooper, trying to rescue his victim and essentially becoming another protagonist — she doesn’t have the acting chops to carry it.

You had something that worked! Leave her on the fucking stage!

The cinematography versus the direction

The movie looks very good.

But for something called Trap, I don’t feel trapped.

There’s too much negative space. Too many wide compositions around Cooper. Too much room to breathe.

I want bodies around him. Security appearing behind him. Narrow hallways. People blocking sightlines. Phones everywhere. Every escape route getting physically smaller.

There is that beautiful moment when Lady Raven is playing the slower piano song and everyone raises their phones, surrounding Cooper with all these little lights.

That’s the movie visually understanding itself.

I just wish it did that more often.

Hayley Mills

And yes, this really is Hayley Mills from The Parent Trap hunting the Butcher, which is objectively wonderful.

But Shyamalan gives Dr. Grant enormous narrative authority without really establishing enough dramatic authority.

He’s done something similar before with Betty Buckley’s psychiatrist in Split: the older cerebral woman who understands the monster.

Mills isn’t bad. But imagine Kathy fucking Bates delivering some of this material.

Suddenly Cooper has a nemesis.

Screenplay convenience

This is where the movie really starts breaking down.

Rachel doesn’t simply tell the police she thinks her husband is the Butcher. She creates this breadcrumb involving the concert receipt because the screenplay needs the police to know the Butcher will be at the concert without knowing who the Butcher is.

Then Cooper needs access to Lady Raven.

Fortunately, he basically bumps into the writer-director of the movie, playing exactly the character capable of giving him that access.

At some point that’s not plotting.

That’s M. Night Shyamalan walking into his own screenplay and handing Josh Hartnett the next page.

And then he leaves the fucking trap

This is my biggest structural problem.

The movie is called Trap.

He’s trapped.

That’s the movie.

Does Cooper escape or doesn’t he?

Instead, Cooper gets out — and the movie keeps going.

Now Lady Raven is involved. Now we’re going home. Now Rachel has to confront him. Now there’s poison. Now there’s another capture.

And everything after the concert feels progressively less interesting than what we left behind.

The craziest part is that Shyamalan himself said the original idea was essentially, let’s make this a thriller in one arena.

YES.

YOU HAD IT.

The better version of Trap

Put Alison Pill at the concert too.

Make it a family outing.

Now Rachel can gradually realize something is wrong. Riley stays emotionally central. Lady Raven remains primarily Lady Raven. Hayley Mills is tightening the noose from outside.

And Cooper has to simultaneously:

escape the FBI, conceal his identity from his wife, protect his daughter’s image of him and navigate thousands of people while the concert keeps moving around him.

You’ve got your entire fucking movie.

And because concerts naturally progress — songs, costume changes, backstage movement, opening acts, encore, crowd surges, exits — you’ve even got a built-in ticking clock.

The thing that frustrates me most: wasted potential

I don’t think Trap is terrible.

That’s almost why it aggravates me more.

I can see the good movie inside it.

There are good performances. There’s an excellent central idea. There’s genuinely accomplished cinematography. The concert production is impressive. There are individual scenes that absolutely work.

But the screenplay feels like it needed another couple of drafts.

And Shyamalan’s independence is interesting in that regard. Self-financing smaller movies helped rescue him after The Last Airbender and After Earth. It gave him back his voice.

But independence also means fewer people telling you:

“Night… why the fuck would the police do that?”

Sometimes studio interference destroys a filmmaker’s vision.

Sometimes the asshole in the conference room has a point.

And Trap feels like a movie where somebody needed to tell Shyamalan:

You’ve got it. The arena is the movie. Stop writing. Go back. Make that version better.

Because the most frustrating thing about Trap isn’t that M. Night Shyamalan had a bad idea.

It’s that he had a really fucking good one — and then abandoned it halfway through.

BOTTOM FIVE TRAPS

#5 — RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)

The Emperor Uses His Actual Weakness as Bait

Look, I understand that the Emperor’s trap basically works. He deliberately lets the Rebels learn that the new Death Star is vulnerable and that the shield protecting it is generated from Endor. They send Han’s team down to destroy it, only to discover that an entire legion of Imperial troops is waiting for them. Meanwhile, the Rebel fleet arrives and finds the Imperial fleet waiting there, too. Admiral Ackbar says the thing, and everybody realizes: it’s a trap.

There’s just one tiny problem.

The information Palpatine leaked is fucking true.

That’s the actual shield generator, and destroying it really will expose the Death Star. Palpatine has therefore constructed an elaborate trap whose bait is the genuine means of defeating him.

And yes, his forces successfully capture Han’s team. Everything is going according to plan. But then one completely unforeseen variable enters the equation: the indigenous population of Endor decides they’ve had enough of the Empire’s shit and helps the Rebels fight back.

Suddenly the real shield generator the Emperor helpfully told everybody about gets destroyed, the Death Star blows up and Palpatine gets tossed down a shaft.

Maybe next time use a decoy, your Highness.

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#4 — SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)

Perfect Bait, World’s Worst Battlefield

Venom and Sandman decide they have a common problem: Spider-Man. And they actually come up with some excellent bait. They kidnap Mary Jane, knowing there is absolutely no scenario in which Peter Parker isn’t coming to rescue her.

So far, excellent trap.

Then they choose where to spring it:

A gigantic open-air construction site.

For Spider-Man.

They have complete freedom to select the battlefield and somehow choose a massive steel structure filled with hundreds of convenient things for Spider-Man to attach webs to, enormous amounts of vertical space and essentially unlimited entrances and exits.

There’s no containment. No controlled approach. No attempt to neutralize Spider-Man’s mobility. And just to make absolutely certain that outside assistance remains possible, they stage the whole fucking thing in public with television cameras watching.

Which becomes rather important when Harry Osborn literally flies into the trap to help Peter.

Venom knows Peter. The symbiote knows Peter’s abilities. They possess irresistible bait and all the preparation time they could want.

And they choose Spider-Man’s natural habitat.

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#3 — BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

The Trap That Fails Successfully

Marty needs George and Lorraine to fall in love, so he concocts a plan: he’ll park with Lorraine at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, pretend to get aggressive with her and George will arrive at exactly the right moment, pull Marty away and become her hero.

There are already several problems with this plan, beginning with Marty having to pretend to sexually assault his own mother.

But it doesn’t matter, because absolutely nothing goes according to plan.

Lorraine starts coming on to Marty. Marty can’t go through with his part. Biff shows up unexpectedly, takes Marty’s place in the car and has his goons lock Marty in a fucking trunk.

Then George arrives on schedule, opens the door expecting Marty…

…and finds Biff actually attacking Lorraine.

So Marty’s carefully staged fake rescue has somehow transformed into the exact same scenario for real.

George finally stands up to Biff, knocks him unconscious and becomes the person Marty was trying to make him pretend to be. Lorraine falls for him.

Marty’s trap has completely, catastrophically failed.

And somehow achieved exactly what it was designed to accomplish.

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#2 — THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)

The Chandelier

By the end of The War of the Roses, Barbara and Oliver aren’t really getting divorced anymore. They’re basically trying to murder one another while protecting the house they both refuse to surrender.

Barbara’s contribution is a wonderfully simple trap: she secretly rigs the enormous chandelier so she can drop it on Oliver.

Which sounds clever until you realize how much of the plan depends upon Oliver conveniently standing underneath a gigantic object at precisely the right moment.

But somehow, the trap gets even worse.

During their final confrontation, Barbara ends up hanging from the chandelier she rigged to kill Oliver.

Oliver attempts to help her and winds up hanging from it too.

The chandelier comes crashing down.

And they both die.

So technically, Barbara’s trap does kill its intended victim.

Unfortunately, it also kills Barbara.

If the person setting the trap ultimately dies in the trap they built, I’m comfortable calling that a design flaw.

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#1 — THE EDGE (1997)

Bob’s Elaborate Plan to Murder Charles

Bob wants Charles dead.

Why? Because Bob is sleeping with Charles’s wife and apparently decides that the most sensible way to resolve this situation is to lure Charles into the Alaskan wilderness and engineer an accidental death.

This is already an extraordinarily elaborate solution to a relatively straightforward murder problem.

But then Bob’s brilliant trap begins encountering variables.

Their plane crashes.

They’re stranded.

A gigantic Kodiak bear starts hunting them.

And worst of all for Bob, the rich older intellectual he has brought into the wilderness specifically because he believes he’ll be vulnerable turns out to be Anthony fucking Hopkins, a man who apparently has read every survival manual ever printed and remembers all of them.

So Bob spends much of the movie being kept alive by the man he’s trying to kill.

Eventually, subtlety goes out the window and Bob just decides to shoot Charles.

And during the confrontation…

Bob falls into a pit and gets impaled.

His entire plan was to lure Charles into an environment where Charles would conveniently die without Bob appearing responsible.

Instead, Charles conquers the environment, kills the bear and survives…

while Bob dies in a fucking hole.

When your murder trap ends with your intended victim trying desperately to save your life, I’d say the trap could have used another draft.