Max Serial Killer Thriller Secretly One Of The Year’s Best Movies
M. Night Shyamalan has been the butt of jokes ever since “I see dead people” became the hottest movie quote of 1999, but with his most recent films, it’s become clear that the director is starting to laugh with the audience. Old made it a little unclear if the humor was intentional or if it was just his overwrought sense of style over substance, but this year, Shyamalan made it clear that he’s in on the joke. Trap is, on the surface, a psychological thriller, but it also has a tongue-in-cheek style and a sense that everyone involved knows how stupid the movie is, and as a result, it’s one of Shyamalan’s best movies.
Serial Dad
Fresh off his well-received turn in Oppenheimer, Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, a Philly firefighter taking his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan, M. Night’s daughter) concert that turns out to be a trap to capture The Butcher, a notorious serial killer famous for leaving piles of body parts around the city. It’s not a spoiler that Cooper is The Butcher, a revelation that in any other movie would be the third-act turning point, but in Trap, it’s a first-act reveal, and the movie’s all the better for it.
Once Cooper realizes he’s trapped inside the arena, Trap starts playing out like a dark comedy version of a Flintstones episode where Fred has to be in two places at once while lying to Wilma (or for other children of the 90s, the Boy Meets World episode where Cory and Shawn watch Vader in a wrestling match during Topanga’s party). Cooper, a dutiful dad, tries to keep his daughter happy while also trying to break free in ever more absurd ways, from sneaking onto the roof to shoving a woman down the stairs. The star shove is the exact moment when it becomes clear that, finally, M. Night Shyamalan is winking at the camera.
Hayley Mills, star of the 1961 film Parent Trap (Get it? Cooper is a parent….in a trap….), plays an FBI profiler who helps provide the most absurd moment of an already absurd film when Cooper gets his hands on a police radio. As he reaches for the fire alarm to create a distraction, Mills explains how The Butcher will likely create a distraction by pulling a fire alarm. Thanks to Trap already making it clear this is not a film to be taken seriously, it’s a stupid moment that works.
Nothing In This Film Should Work
I wish the actual trap sequence in Trap was a bit longer, actually, only because Hartnett does an amazing job of slowly coming apart at the seams while trying to hold himself together for the sake of his daughter. That and, when it ends, the movie shifts focus onto Lady Raven and Cooper’s homelife, which still has some amazingly stupid but delightful moments, with the limo ride being a highlight to me because of its Looney Tunes logic, but it lacks the frenzied absurd stakes of the concert. Just as the killer reveal would be the highlight of another movie, the escape from the titular trap is just another moment in this film and not the actual ending.
The weakest part of Trap is Saleka Night Shyamalan as Lady Raven, an amalgamation of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, but that’s because she’s a musician first, and this is her first acting role. With that in mind, she does a great job, and her seeming slightly out of place during the entire film helps work for the character, but in any other film, her line delivery would immediately take you out of the story. Under her dad’s direction, the awkwardness, like Cooper’s absurdist humor, somehow works.
A One-Of-A-Kind Experience
Trap is a film that has divided audiences and critics, with a 57 percent rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes; this is a movie that you will either love or hate. I really enjoyed it, mostly because of Josh Hartnett, who somehow elevates the script by chewing every piece of the scenery in a way he wasn’t even able to do on the gothic horror Penny Dreadful. No film in recent memory can match the manic energy, bizarre story choices, and off-kilter tone of Trap, which makes it a one-of-a-kind viewing experience.
You can stream Trap today on Max.
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