Josh is Afraid
No need for qualifiers, no more room for equivocation and that awful concept of the “guilty pleasure.” An industry and an entertainment press stung by the “cockiness” of a director in his early-30s achieving global recognition with precisely one movie (The Sixth Sense) were ready to pounce and tear M. Night Shyamalan down as early as the 2000 Oscar’s aired and Haley Joel Osment came and went without an award for Best Supporting Actor. None of Shyamalan’s films have been well reviewed in initial release aside from 2002’s Signs, which looks a lot worse now than it did back then—the tearful goodbye speech with the wife pinned between a car and a tree is too ridiculous and horrific to work even comedically (Scary Movie 3 did a fine job, though). I forgot that you actually see the alien in Signs, and it’s just a disaster, a CGI abomination that drains the movie of any suspense or mystery it had at the beginning.
As I wrote recently, The Village and The Happening are both genuine bananas crazy masterpieces, but they’re not pure entertainments (The Happening is on paper but in practice too bizarre and unsettling). Shyamalan considers Signs his “most popcorn movie,” and I’d agree until now: Trap is the best film he’s made since the 2000s, a top-tier work that stands among his 2000s hot streak. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable sit above everything else, and because every Shyamalan film is judged against those, it looked like he was sinking into self-parody by the end of the 2000s. But the goofy and violent atmosphere of The Happening, baffling at first, feels masterful now, or at least sui generis. That movie is one of the few September 11 allegories that worked.
Trap isn’t a mass shooting thriller, despite the arena concert setting and the serial killer star. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, father of a young girl obsessed with Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), an en vogue pop star playing in Philadelphia (actually Ontario, only notable since this is only the second time Shyamalan has left the Philadelphia area to make a film—another reason why the industry and the press hated him). You know all of this from the trailer. But the concert happens in real time, and pop concerts are shorter than movies, so by the time you think Cooper’s free—Hartnett’s impossible not to cheerlead, even as he brags about being able to kill someone with carbon monoxide from his phone—there’s still another hour left. Not a knock, because from there you remember we haven’t met whoever Alison Pill plays, and he’s already upped the ante on his escape. That concert was a trap! Surrounded by SWAT Teams and a specialist psychologist played by Hayley Mills, Cooper must figure a way out.
Trap is Funny Games with a sense of humor and a love of genre cinema rather than contempt. The last 30 minutes have some of the most visceral and disturbing sequences that Shyamalan has directed since Unbreakable. This is a slightly sillier movie, but it must also be said that Shyamalan has reigned in his instinct to over-explain in his endings, at least visually: an old woman appearing in certain shots staring directly at the camera doesn’t develop into something ridiculous. His most recent two films, Old and Knock at the Cabin, were more experimental and spare; two sorrowful movies coming right out of the pandemic; if Trap has anything to say, it’s this: “Quit brooding. Get going.”
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith