High Concepts, Hubris, and M. Night Shyamalan: It's Time to Talk About 'Trap'
The big twist is his massive ego!
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I didn’t review Trap when it came out, partly because I didn’t feel like getting yelled at by the mob of Shyamalan fanatics with Letterboxd links in their bios, and partly because I’ve come to understand over the years that Shyamalan movies just aren’t my cup of tea (The Sixth Sense was good). Creating that distance between myself and his work allows me to see Shyamalan’s career resurgence of late as a net positive for Cinema as a whole. Original movies? Good for him! Good for us all.
As Colby Day wrote when Trap came out, “M. Night Shyamalan is just the king of high concept ideas. A boy who talks to ghosts. A beach that makes you old. A concert that’s actually all a trap. Whether or not you like his style, you have to admit that the guy knows how to come up with an extremely hooky premise.”
And it’s true — whatever problems I may have with Shyamalan’s story choices, he can still compose a beautiful scene in ways most modern filmmakers can’t, and he’s always been a master of the elevator pitch (sometimes literally so). So now that the hubbub has died down and Trap is free on the app formerly known as HBO, I figured it was finally safe to check it out.
Having seen it, my willingness to step aside and Let People Enjoy Things has completely evaporated. Trap is a film that positively demands that you scream at your friends about it afterwards. In fact, I think part of the reason M. Night Shyamalan’s reputation was so bad for so many years is that he’s so good at creating conversation fodder. There are countless filmmakers whose work is bad, dull, incoherent, forgettable; to be none of those things and still an infuriating filmmaker is a particular kind of skill.
Yes, M. Night Shyamalan is the king of high concept ideas. Trap proves that once again, and yet usually the way a big, silly idea works is, you get people to suspend a little disbelief for the premise and then keep baking in more and more realism until the audience isn’t just willing to wait-and-see, but fully invested. In Trap, Shyamalan starts with a sort of ridicuous idea, and then just keeps building more and more ridiculousness into it, and just when you think it can’t possibly hold any more, it gets even dumber. And this time around, the “big twist” is the extent of his ego.
Certainly we always knew it was there (read The Man Who Heard Voices if you haven’t) but there’s a reveal midway through Trap that’s like the temple shot in From Dusk till Dawn — oh baby, we were only seeing the top ten percent before, that thing goes all the way down. Trap isn’t great as a movie, but it’s fascinating as a character study.
The premise of Trap is that the FBI, in trying to catch a serial killer, has helped to stage an entire concert in the city where the killer lives (Philadelphia, where all M. Night Shyamalan’s movies are set, it’s one of his more lovable quirks), knowing that he would almost certainly take his tweenage superfan daughter to it. Just imagine the artist is a stand-in for Taylor Swift and you get the premise. Josh Hartnett plays the dad/serial killer, and he’s legitimately great in Trap, the best work he’s done in years.
Yet almost immediately the cracks in this premise start to show. For one thing, the way Shyamalan has written this, the concert is crawling with SWAT team commandos, police, and FBI agents, covering every exit. But none of them actually know what the killer looks like. I guess Shyamalan figured that it wouldn’t be interesting if the cops could just be looking for a guy who looked like Josh Hartnett and arrest him on sight. And so his solution to that was to imagine a world where the FBI, the SWAT team, the local police, arena staff, and ersatz Taylor Swift all collaborate on a plan to trap a serial killer whose identity they don’t even actually know. They have a few competing descriptions of the killer, supposedly drawn from surveillance camera footage, but mostly they have no idea. Now I’m no FBI agent, but to me that plan seems a lot like luring a needle to a particular location and then covering it with a haystack.
Furthermore, their plan for figuring out this serial killer’s identity involves the entire operation being directed by a criminal profiler. Throughout the film, she’s giving her massive team of officials helpful advice through their earpieces like, “The killer is an OCD-type, meaning he probably drives a late model sedan in a dark color, since it would be easier to keep clean.”
I do love the idea of a thousand trigger-happy cops taking orders from a Reddit psychologist. The FBI profiler, by the way, is an old British lady. And she must be good, because this serial killer’s MO, which includes kidnapping and murdering nice young men, like a guy who works in sustainable agriculture, apparently because of the killer’s “maternal issues” (Harnett’s character occasionally has visions of this mother, Psycho-style) doesn’t make any fucking sense. Shyamalan doesn’t even really attempt to reconcile a guy with mommy issues murdering young men.
…See what I mean?
But fine, I could accept all that. Josh Harnett is fun to watch and M. Night Shyamalan, whatever his faults, can certainly compose a cinematic scene. And the premise is intriguing enough, even if it keeps asking you to suspend greater and greater levels of disbelief in order for it to work. I could even accept, at first, that the Pseudo-Taylor Swift character around which this entire concert was staged — “Lady Raven” — is played by Saleka. Aka Saleka Night Shyamalan. Aka M. Night’s daughter, an actual pop star (I guess?) singing her own original songs in the film. (Yes, you can buy the album, of course you can buy the album).
And that part works fine! Nothing about the songs or the performance is distracting enough that it undercuts the basic premise of Lady Raven being a famous pop star beloved by tween girls who serial killer Josh Hartnett’s daughter would definitely force him to take her to see. She passes the smell test, and her casting itself seems at first like the kind of Adam Sandler-level nepotism that comes off more charming than sociopathic.
Through an only medium-preposterous series of events, Hartnett (aka Cooper, aka “The Butcher”) gets the lowdown on the operation from a curiously chatty merch salesman (Jonathan Langdon), who explains that the exits are all covered, and that there’s no way in or out of this place except backstage. Ah, but! Riley, Cooper’s daughter (played by Ariel Donoghue, whose Australian accent only slips out a couple times) explains that the part of the concert that she’s really excited about is when Lady Raven picks a “Dreamer” out of the audience to dance with her onstage for a song.
And so Cooper figures out where Lady Raven’s handler is in the crowd (played by M. Night himself) and tells him a Leukemia lie that succeeds in getting Riley chosen as the designated Dreamer. I imagine anyone working for Taylor Swift has probably heard so many leukemia lies by now as to be immune to them, but sure, fine.
If you’ve managed to buy into Trap’s premise so far, it then asks you to believe, in a psuedo-Taylor Swift concert staged entirely to catch a serial killer, that the authorities would somehow also manage to let that serial killer end up alone in a room with the psuedo-Taylor Swift megastar character multiple times.
And that’s when the reveal happens. It turns out, Shyamalan didn’t just cast his singer daughter as the Taylor Swift-esque pop star staging a concert in the film. He cast her in a pivotal role. Arguably the pivotal role, of a famous recording artist who uses every ounce of her guile, empathy, and connection to her legion of young fans in order to catch a serial killer before he can murder that nice man who works in sustainable agriculture because he’s OCD and hates his mother for some reason.
Whatever buy-in M. Night Shyamalan had earned casting his daughter as a famous pop star evaporates entirely when he asks her to perform this incredibly nuanced acting job.