Josh Hartnett squirms and plots through M. Night Shyamalan's perfectly thrilling Trap

Cooper has been correctly profiled by a supposed expert (Hayley Mills, who knows a thing or two about parent traps) as a relentlessly crafty fellow, and indeed, much of Trap involves watching Hartnett squirm and plot his way out of a big location that has turned into an extremely tight spot, made tighter by the fact that he has his daughter in tow. Appropriate for a filmmaker who loves the art of the self-cameo, it’s a Hitchcockian scenario—only in Shyamalan’s version, it’s not a regular man thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but a genuinely guilty killer. Call it a Right Man thriller.

Though his diehards will insist that even some of his supposed disasters have elements to recommend them (and they wouldn’t be wrong!), Shyamalan has revitalized his later-period career by going small: limited locations, intimate casts, Twilight Zone ideas executed in under two hours. That was actually true of his earlier genre movies, too, but it’s more obvious and pronounced in rigorously blocked and shot exercises like Old, A Knock At The Cabin, and now Trap—which further strips down the family dynamics of his last few pictures into something both slippery and agile. Working with Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and shooting on celluloid, Shyamalan constantly emphasizes the size of the venue and Cooper’s position in it without relying on many conventional wide establishing shots. Some of his techniques are relatively simple, like how Lady Raven’s performances are seen almost entirely from Cooper’s vantage. This means there’s no concert-movie swoop-ins intercut with the audience-level action, a limitation that has a subtle psychological payoff in later scenes. Elsewhere, the film uses extreme foreground and background action or overhead shots to make us search the frame for Cooper as he schemes for a way out. The camera is positioned with such a purposeful mix of disorientation and clarity that some shifts in audience point of view—for the initial stretch, we’re very much invited to identify with Cooper, despite his misdeeds—feel more surprisingly natural, and less jarring, than they should.

For all his formal rigor and ambition, Shyamalan adheres, sometimes rigidly, to genre convention. As with Old, Trap reaches a point where it could easily depart its mouse-and-cat reversals and thriller mechanics in favor of something trickier, stranger, and more profound. There’s a deep well of sadness underneath the twitchy-fun premise—in trying to figure out how, exactly, Cooper plans to keep squaring his wholesome love for his daughter with his apparent compulsion to murder (and desire to escape). Hartnett plays this conflict perfectly, suggesting less of a façade and more of a well-rehearsed but maybe not quite perfect compartmentalization, long before Cooper brings up the subject in dialogue. It’s not exactly that Shyamalan opts out of that thorniness entirely, the way he sometimes appears weirdly attached to the doctor-led explanation of the last few minutes of Psycho. He just seems a little bit reluctant to follow the father-daughter part of his story to its own discrete conclusion—whether tragic, twisted, or some oddball other thing. To his credit, Shyamalan doesn’t try to make Cooper into a cuddly monster, while admitting in interviews that he identifies with the guy anyway, trying to parent his daughter from the correct distance. Yet there are times when it feels like he’s more comfortable staring into Cooper’s psychological abyss (and his unflagging resourcefulness) than stepping back for a broader view.

That’s in keeping with the filmmaking, at least, and maybe Shyamalan means for that tension to remain unresolvable; maybe that’s part of what gives Trap an eerie, uneasy power despite not invoking the supernatural touches Shyamalan is generally known for. Despite the lack of superhumans, ghosts, or ladies in the water, there are times when Cooper feels a bit like the James McAvoy beast and Bruce Willis hero from the Unbreakable trilogy, struggling to inhabit the same body, all while attempting to keep his daughter happier and healthier than he is. On one level, Shyamalan feels more comfortable than ever; Trap may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in his last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can’t, and probably shouldn’t, ever get out of his system.

Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, Alison Pill
Release Date: August 2, 2024