As a filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan has been a household name for 25 years, starting in 1999, when he ruled the end of the summer with “The Sixth Sense.” You can basically divide the Shyamalan oeuvre into four periods. There was the era when he was an A-list visionary who some compared to Spielberg (a period that includes his finest film, “Unbreakable,” as well as “Signs” and “The Village”). There was the era when he began to lapse into self-parody (“Lady in the Water,” “The Happening”), and when the whole notion of the Shyamalan twist ending became less an entertainer’s trademark than a sign of the rut he was in.
There was the period when he left all that behind to reinvent himself as an anonymous sci-fi craftsman (“The Last Airbender,” “After Earth”). And then there was the comeback era that began with “Split” (2016), his big hit featuring James McAvoy as a chatterbox psycho with multiple-annoying-personality disorder. From that point on, the Shyamalan brand regained a kind of parody of its former luster. People were coming out to see his films again, but his A-list aura had been replaced by an unabashed anything-goes B-movie trashiness.
You go into a new Shyamalan movie assuming that it will fall into that last period, but always hoping that he’ll revert back to the Shyamalan we first fell for: the spectacular sleight-of-hand thriller artist. Yet “Trap,” his new movie, may actually herald a new period for Shyamalan. Let’s call it the so-contrived-it-makes-Brian-De-Palma’s-loopiest-flights-of-fancy-look-real era.
For about half the film, we’re watching a movie in the genre of De Palma’s “Snake Eyes”: a real-time thriller set in a crowded performance arena, where a giant entertainment event is both center stage and the drama’s elaborate backdrop. The event, in this case, is a concert given by Lady Raven, a pop superstar (played by Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka Shyamalan) who’s a kind of mashup of Lady Gaga and Olivia Rodrigo. Her songs are pulsating and catchy (Saleka Shyamalan wrote them, and they’re pretty damn good, as is her performance), inspiring her fans, who are mostly teenage girls, to sing along with every word and to scream at nearly every moment in awestruck Beatlemania.
One of those fans is Riley (Alison Donoughue), a winsome middle schooler who has come to the concert, at Tanaka Arena, with her father, Cooper (Josh Hartnett). He’s trying to bond with her by playing up the “I’m a hip dad!” enthusiasm as he shepherds her to her dream concert. But he’s trying too hard. When he drops a word like “jelly” (for jealous), it’s cringe. And though he’s gotten them seats on the floor (in the 44th row), her friends — or, rather, the cool girls who were friends with her last week, until they weren’t — have better seats. In the perpetual reality competition show that is middle-class domestic life in the 21st century, that means that Cooper has done his job just…okay.
Hartnett, who exudes star quality (he always did), imbues the character with an overeager sweetness that draws us right in. At least, it does until Cooper goes for a bathroom break and takes out his cell phone…to check up on the victim he has got imprisoned in a suburban basement somewhere. Not exactly the movie we thought we were watching. But yes, we’ve seen this movie too.
Warning: This is not a spoiler — it’s the very premise of “Trap.” Cooper is a serial killer known as the Butcher. He has 12 victims, each of whom he has left cut up in pieces. There’s been a manhunt to catch him going on for seven years. But now the authorities, led by a veteran FBI profiler (played by the British former child actor Haley Mills), have sprung the ultimate trap. They have learned that the Butcher is going to be attending Lady Raven’s concert. And so they’ve surrounded Tanaka Arena with S.W.A.T. team members; no one can get out. There are 20,000 people attending the concert, 3,000 of whom are adult males. The authorities have various (conflicting) clues about the killer from surveillance footage (they’ve never seen what he looks like), and one possible clue: an animal tattoo. They know the Butcher is at the concert. Their agenda is to uncover him.
Right away, though, you may think: How, exactly, are they going to do that? Serial killers are notorious wizards at eluding the police. They’re all about anonymity. Is the FBI going to interrogate each of the 3,000 men at the concert before they leave? That would take three days. Or is the profiler, with that sixth sense of hers, going to somehow know who he is?
Cooper learns about all of this from a T-shirt clerk at a merch counter, and from the moment he does, his agenda is to slip out of the concert. Even though, as he discovers, the only possible way to do that is by getting backstage. For a while, as Cooper does things like steal a pass key, infiltrate a police pep talk, and bicker with the mother (Marnie McPhail) of one his daughter’s fickle friends, we go with the flow of the action, even as it’s all a bit heightened in its Shyamalan Zone unreality. Josh Hartnett is such a good actor that we’re more willing than not to follow in his paces as a killer in the vein of Joseph Cotton’s treacherous Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt.”
But then we arrive at the moment where Shyamalan, tapping out his screenplay (I have long claimed that Shyamalan the writer martyrs Shyamalan the director), comes up with a twist where someone should really have looked over his shoulder and said, “No.” It actually involves Shyamalan in a cameo appearance. He plays the uncle of Lady Raven, who Cooper just happens to run into in the middle of the concert. This allows Cooper to tell a lie about Riley having had leukemia, which is his way of getting her to be chosen as the Dreamer Girl who goes onstage to dance with Lady Raven. All of this happens…so that the film can get Cooper backstage!
Around the time Cooper engages in a private dialogue with Lady Raven in her dressing room, we’re watching a movie that has abandoned all logic and plausibility. It’s not that I don’t buy that they could have that meeting; it’s that he outs himself to her as the killer. From that point on, whatever elaborate plan he comes up with, couldn’t she just…identify him? I guess we’re supposed to say, “Aha! It’s a ride! Go with it!” But asking an audience to go with something this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.
The second half of “Trap” is one trap door of contrivance after another. The movie turns into a “study” of Cooper: his stealth moves, his mommy issues, his divided personality. Yes, he really is a butcher, but he’s also a family man who loves his children. Talk about a split. A movie like “The Boston Strangler” (1968) dealt with this kind of thing in a haunting way, but as the contrivances of “Trap” balloon into something almost grotesque in their borderline absurdity, the movie raises the question: How invested can we be in a high-concept serial killer whose emotions are no more believable than his escapes?