“Trap” review: M. Night Shyamalan’s bona fide serial killer thriller

M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is pretty much exactly what was advertised: a playful and increasingly ludicrous game of cat-and-mouse through a concert (and beyond), in which a charismatic serial killer is just trying to have a good evening with his daughter. Some will probably call it a return to form (as has inevitably happened to every post-After Earth film Shyamalan has done), but really this brand of thriller feels distinctly un-Shyamalan, which I mean in the most neutral way possible.

And, on the bright side, this is one of the rare Shyamalan films to earn the “thriller” label despite almost all of his films being marketed as such. It feels like a full-circle moment in that sense, as studios have gone from dubiously marketing his superhero movies, dramas, and horror films as “thrillers” to marketing his actual thriller as simply an M. Night Shyamalan “experience.” It goes without saying that he’s as great as ever at conveying suspense, and unsurprisingly the twistiness is near-unending, but what sets this apart is that it feels like “sheer fun” ranked higher on his list of priorities as a writer/director than ever before, for better or for worse. It’s more stressful than harrowing (despite the grisly serial killer at the film’s core), and our allegiance as the audience seems to shift multiple times over the course of the film, which somewhat prevents horror from setting in.

And while an emotional core is there in the relationship between the father (Cooper, an undercover killer played by Josh Hartnett) and daughter (Riley, an enthusiastic and chronically unproblematic kid played by Ariel Donoghue), this relationship feels less like the thesis of the film than it might’ve elsewhere in Shyamalan’s filmography. The two have a great dynamic and Ariel Donoghue holds her own acting alongside Josh Hartnett, but Shyamalan unfortunately doesn’t give her as much to do as most of the child actors in his films and instead slides the emotional peak over to Alison Pill, who plays Cooper’s wife. Still, that believable father-daughter relationship gives Hartnett something to play off of, and through this he masterfully conveys the devastation of having his two lives collide, his family upended by his own wickedness. It’s hard not to feel an intense desire for him to simply be good, or to at least do the right thing, even knowing how impossible that is.

There’s a chunk of the film where Lady Raven, the pop star played by Shyamalan’s own daughter Saleka, arguably becomes the focus, which helps smooth the transition from us rooting for Cooper to us rooting against him. However, when she’s replacing Josh Hartnett’s absolute magnetism, Saleka’s shortcomings as an actor do show a bit. She’s a good singer and I can’t even really say I dislike how she inhabited her role, but I couldn’t help but imagine an actual actor playing the character instead. It’s hard to gauge her performance, and it could have very well been played the same by a more experienced actor, but I can only wonder. I guess having someone lipsync her songs would have somewhat defeated the purpose of her inclusion, though. That aside, Shyamalan is playing by his own rules here and I found the set-ups and pay-offs to be consistently satisfying. It’s like watching someone construct a hilariously intricate Rube Goldberg machine and setting it off, even if some of the components of this metaphorical machine don’t exactly follow metaphorical physics: The game may be rigged, but that doesn’t detract from the excitement of the chain reaction.

There is a sort of pleasure to seeing a serial killer character exercising hypercompetence in an environment that seems perfectly constructed in their favor, yet all the while you know that the beartrap has to snap shut eventually. Throw in some key scenes that are just teeming with back-and-forth tension and it’s easy to endear me to something like this. And even without as poignant of theming as Shyamalan’s past few, there remain intriguing subtleties to the lens he places on his characters, from Riley’s friend drama to Lady Raven’s inhaler. It’s always interesting to see the sprinkles of realism he throws into his often decidedly unreal films that center around an absurd premise.

It must be said, though, that Shyamalan has got to let go of the whole mental health angle, particularly if he’s just going to throw it in as a vague character background attribute rather than treat it as a delicate central theme. That’s one thing he hasn’t really gotten right since The Sixth Sense (it also worked well in The Visit, but only on the kids’ side), though I’m hesitant to compare everything to the film that is nearly universally considered his best.