“Don’t say jelly, Dad.”
Those who found Old (2021) and Knock at the Cabin (2023) a skosh too navel-gazey and self-consciously allegorical (I tentatively raise my hand) might find that Trap suits their fancy with its pure genre thrills: a father (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a pop show, clearly enjoying the awkward daddy-daughter fish-out-of-water dynamic as he tries to use teen slang and fit in with the crazy kids, realizes the place is crawling with cops (the camera nicely attuned to his hyper-alert perspective), asks a t-shirt vendor why, and is informed that the whole concert is a sting operation for a serial killer known as The Butcher, at which point—if we haven’t picked up on a few previous clues including but not limited to a quick check of the cellphone camera showing a hostage in a basement somewhere, an apparition of an old woman, and Hartnett “acting weird” as his movie-daughter would say—we realize that Hartnett’s goofy suburban dad is the tabloid villain himself and will now commence with sociopathic relish a desperate attempt to escape the venue without revealing his identity, a feat which involves maiming a fast food worker, stealing a keycard and police radio, and bluffing his way backstage along with his oblivious daughter to meet up with the popstar (Saleka Night Shyamalan) and eavesdrop on the FBI profiler (Hayley Mills), frequently and amusingly toggling between cringy dad and criminal mastermind at the drop of a hat.
None of the spirituality of The Sixth Sense (1999) or Signs (2002) nor the mythmaking of Unbreakable (2000) is in evidence here. It’s just the not-quite-elaborate game of cat and mouse. But while there’s certainly a ceiling to such themeless thrillers, Shyamalan has had a lot of practice by now and his projects tend to have a pretty respectable floor as well, with a slick film style that can mask over almost any plot hole or inane bit of dialogue (I don’t remember much of what Hartnett said but I vividly recall the way Shyamalan carefully framed him in conversation), and I for one found immense pleasure in watching the filmmaker work through the gleeful mechanical contraption he rigged up to ensnare his protagonist even while acknowledging that his effort in conception and execution doesn’t come close to the works of Hitchcock and De Palma that inspired it.1
As has been the case with the bulk of Shyamalan’s career renaissance films, he’s not so much cranking out great art as proving a viable mode of filmmaking outside the regular studio channels. He’s out here helming high quality films (if not writing high quality scripts) that he mostly funds on his own, and he can do so because well-crafted, unapologetic, unembarrassed, earnestly silly pulp thrillers are not in abundance and yet—who would believe it—they make money. Said money can buy a lavish estate and a Lamborghini or whatever but it can also fund the next high concept mini-blockbuster, and so on and so forth. And but so while Trap isn’t especially resonant or meaningful, eliciting neither sympathy nor a sense of complicity in the viewer, and churns through absurdity upon absurdity after the killer evades the sprawling manhunt, one must conclude that cinema could do with more stylish mid-budget romps just like it.
1. It may be the case that Trap isn’t appreciably worse than the films narratively similar to it by those two titans of thriller cinema, namely Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) and De Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998).