‘Trap’ Review: Always Rooting for the Anti-Hero

You never know what you’re going to get from an M. Night Shyamalan film. You might, occasionally, still get the patient, thoughtful auteur who made The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and last year’s Knock at the Cabin. But more often than not, you’ll get some flavor of the weird, schlocky, Corman-esque scamp who made The Visit and Glass, high concepts executed with stylish conviction but let down by gloriously messy storytelling.

Trap is largely the work of the Shyamalan who brought made those latter films. It has a great concept that crumbles to pieces before you’re done asking the very first question about the screenplay’s paper-thin grasp on the logistics of the real world. But there’s almost enough genuinely enthralling intensity here to patch over the film’s weaknesses.

The lion’s share of that can be credited to Josh Hartnett, experiencing a minor renaissance of late for the way he invests his characters with off-kilter emotional undercurrents. In what’s his most audacious role to date, the actor stars here as a serial killer with OCD named the Butcher, who’s apparently moonlighting as a goofball dad named Cooper with a loving, oblivious family.

Cooper takes his cheery 11-year old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to an arena-scale pop concert by an artist named Lady Raven (singer-songwriter Saleka Shyamalan, known mononymously as Saleka). It’s there that he quickly learns that the show is a setup by seemingly every law enforcement agency in the country to trap him. If your first question is how they expect to trap a single man in a massive arena with dozens of exits and a crowd of thousands wandering the halls, you might want to tap out now, because that’s just a tiny taste of a plot that has logistical holes big enough to rehome a whole family of those worms from Tremors.

And yet, Shyamalan the auteur still shows up and shows out in Trap. Even with its logic gaps, stretches of the film are electric in their ability to tighten the screws on Cooper. The pop concert full of screaming teenagers acts as a sort of buzzy, alien forest that the militarized law enforcement presence stands in stark, unnerving contrast to, and Shyamalan’s use of space, as Cooper struggles to find pockets of places that will provide him with refuge, extremely well.

Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom might as well be the second billed star here. His images take a page from Silence of the Lambs for the way they’re seemingly confrontational, as characters stare directly into the camera and into Cooper’s steely eyes, searching for a humanity and empathy that’s not actually there, despite his distressing, mirthless smiles and other odd tics. Trap is a film full of disorienting angles, split-diopter shots, and beautifully executed pans.

In one moment, Hartnett is fun and low-key kooky in that way that only suburban dads can be, and in the next he’s a dead-eyed trapped beast searching for the right time to sink his teeth into his prey—that is, just after he’s gotten them to tremble with fear. One of the most chilling scenes in Trap involves little more than Hartnett eating a slice of pie. The payoff is weak, but in the moment, the film expertly twists the knife in the same way that Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs does.

Outside of such remarkably engineered moments, and for better and for worse, Shyamalan is fully in a gleefully impish mode. The lack of cohesiveness that defines this trashy Z-grade material is such that you may find yourself unsure if you should be laughing with the film or at it. In addition to the perhaps expected series of contrivances, Trap is near-suffocated by weak exposition, despite much of it being provided by, of all people, Hayley Mills in a fierce turn redolent of Halloween’s Sam Loomis. It also features some of the dumbest law enforcement officials in the history of cinema. Without spoiling the ridiculous surprises, suffice it to say, there are no questions by the end of why the Butcher has been on the lam for so long.