TRAP: A Concert You’ll Want To Bail

Trap is a golden example of how to take a genius premise, then slowly devolve it into a mess of half-baked cliches and implausibilities. Despite some solid acting, and an eye for how to use the camera to build tension, a movie seemingly gift-wrapped for greatness eventually crumbles under its own logic. Like the Titanic, it has a good thing going till it hits an iceberg, than sinks lower with each passing minute.

What’s the Gist?

The story follows Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a seemingly average suburban dad, as he takes his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert. As they arrive, an increasingly nervous Cooper notices that authorities have secured the parameter, with increasingly stringent protocol in place. It turns out Cooper is a murderer they’ve been searching for, and this concert is the perfect trap for him. With limited options at hand, Cooper must use all of his creative thinking to avoid apprehension.

What Works?

In its first third, Trap feels like a slightly old-school, Hitchcockian thriller (a comparison that would likely flatter Shyamalan, given Psycho is one of his favorite films). Cinematographer Sayombu Mukdeeprom uses all of his wits to make each angle and movement emphasize Cooper’s confined and stressed mindset as he struggles to think his way out of trouble. In addition, Josh Hartnett, creates a fully-fledged, wily and eerily convincing middle-class dad. His boyish charm, mixed with a slight edginess, reminds you that you could easily meet someone like him without knowing it. But that’s about where all the positives stop.

Where It Goes Downhill

After that deceptively promising first third, Trap just gets ever worse as it drags along. First off, there are plot holes galore. I often found myself thinking, “How doesn’t anybody catch this guy based on the security camera footage? There’s eyes everywhere in this place?”, or “Why are there young girls being taken aside by authorities like they’re sick or injured?” “How do the cops apprehend the wrong person when their suspect is on the cameras they monitor constantly?” Those are just a few amongst the abundant gaps in logic that kept me from truly being on the edge of my seat. Shyamalan‘s screenplay is one hundred percent to blame for that.

The characters are also remarkably dumb at times. Cooper’s credibility as a skilled, deceptive killer also decreases greatly as the story goes. His constant penchant for excuses when he wants to step away and see how to escape the concert arena afterward, gets laughably suspicious. I’m shocked that somehow, Riley continuously got duped into buying her father’s baloney, or that Cooper was able to fool a security guard into unknowingly helping him with his conniving plot.

Believe me or not, it still gets worse from there. The singer performing at this concert, played by Shaleka Shyamalan (Shyamalan‘s daughter), becomes a pivotal supporting character later in the film, as the story leaves the arena and makes its way to Cooper’s home. Putting aside the ludicrousness of a pop singer inviting herself to a concertgoer’s house, this whole last third feels overlong, and throws in a lot of sudden revelations and details that are increasingly laughable, partly because they weren’t set up prior, and especially because we’re suddenly given a ton of backstory that should have parceled out across the narrative, not in the home stretch. While I won’t give anything away, once it all comes together- or doesn’t, really- it’s hard to know what to take away. So much has been thrown at us that we can’t tell if the movie was trying to say something or not, and if so, what.

On top of that, taking the story away from the concert venue just dissipates the tension greatly. When we’re stuck with our lead in that sole environment, it makes the stakes feel more real because the mutual scope for both us and Cooper has been so greatly limited. The best comparison I can make is with the interactions between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) versus Hannibal (2001). In the former, Hannibal Lecter was largely kept behind bars. Removing his ability to roam free, whilst still giving him the psychological tools to manipulate Clarice, still left him a credible threat and helped make the pair’s interactions more chilling. In the latter movie, we got the opposite; Hannibal had the ability to be anywhere at any time, and it removed a great level of tension that existed in its predecessor, making his connection with Clarice feel like a far more generic cop-versus-criminal pursuit. Trap makes the fatal mistake of combining both methods to build suspense.

It’s my understanding that Shyamalan and his daughter cooked this up together, thinking it’d make an intense experience, as well as a perfect opportunity to showcase her singing and acting abilities. Despite their passionate efforts, nothing about the story coheres into a satisfying whole. The greatest pleasure of a movie like this is usually seeing how all of those subtle details you noticed early on pay off by the end, which can often reward subsequent viewings. Not only do none of the details in Trap truly pay off, but the more you think about it, the less it makes sense. Walking out of the theater, I couldn’t believe this was by the same person who directed Unbreakable (2000), The Sixth Sense (1999), and Split (2017). Heck, even Old (2021), at the very least, had a firm idea of what it wanted to say, despite not saying it well.

What’s It All Amount To?

Honestly, this whole experience is much ado about nothing. If you’re looking for a genuinely electrifying experience, rent Rear Window (1954), a masterclass in how to create and sustain tension while restricted to one location. Or, you can revisit any of the previous Shyamalan movies I mentioned. Whatever you do, if you want to be unsettled, frightened, or surprised, Trap is the last place you want to turn to.