Trap: It’s kinda dope, right?

In 1999, when I was 6 years old, M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense debuted. This was not Shyamalan’s first feature film, but it may as well have been from the way it gripped the cultural zeitgeist. Shyamalan’s particular brand of big-twist-no-whammies suspense films would become a cultural touchstone throughout my childhood and teen years, ultimately turning into a punchline as his critical successes began to dwindle. Most of my memories of his films are drawn from parodies, from SNL sketches to the Scary Movie series that Comedy Central seemingly played on an endless loop in the 2000s.

Last year, a few friends and I decided, for reasons I no longer remember, to revisit Shyamalan’s full filmography. I went into that thinking it’d be fun in the way that watching bad movies in general is fun for me. I came out of it an M. Night Super Fan. Which was, it turns out, the best possible way I could have set myself up for his 2024 release Trap. 

The thing about M. Night is, whether you like his particular brand of storytelling or not, he’s incredibly consistent in his goals as a filmmaker. Trap feels like a natural evolution of those goals: He’s clearly invested in the family unit, particularly through the lens of fatherhood; he loves a spectacle as much as a metaphor; he works his narratives through a series of unexpected twists. Watching a Shyamalan film feels like watching one of those elaborate, viral domino setups. And yeah, sometimes this works against him, sometimes he gets a little too caught up in the trick—to the point that I realized I could, for most of his films, mark when 20 minutes were left by the moment he would completely take the wind out of my sails by undoing all the work he’d put into setting up the dominos. 

Trap echoes much of his filmography—his interest in fatherhood especially—but eschews his traditional “big twist” in favor of a series of escalating, but surprisingly grounded, reveals. Okay, hold on, let me unpack this all first. The plot of Trap is simple: A father brings his pre-teen daughter to a Taylor Swift-style mega-pop star’s concert. He notices there’s a lot of cops and SWAT teams around, and manages to get an employee to tell him a serial killer by the name of “the Butcher” is in attendance, and the concert is a trap to catch him. Hey! That’s the name of the movie!

All of this is revealed to us in the trailer, where we learn the twist: the main character, Cooper, is the Butcher. Even if you missed the trailer, this fact is revealed pretty quickly into the 105 minute runtime. This is not a movie where the twist is who the serial killer turns out to be. If anything, the twist is that we know he’s the serial killer already. What ensues is a delightful cat-and-mouse as Cooper lies and sneaks his way around the concert venue, fooling various employees and the realistically incompetent security staff and SWAT team, trying to work out how he can escape with his identity as a loving, non-serial-killer father preserved. Without giving away too much: there’s no secret second big twist coming. 

The real tension is not Cooper’s ability to deceive those around him—he does this nearly effortlessly, bluffing his way through squadrons of heavily armed police, swiping employee IDs and wallets—but his desire to escape while preserving his innocence in the eyes of his daughter Riley (played by Ariel Donoghue). His relationship with his daughter never feels inauthentic: he clearly adores her, is interested in her life, and his rising anxiety at being caught stems from the fact that if he is, that means his daughter will know about his secret life. Maintaining that separation is both his critical motivation and, ultimately, his undoing, as things spiral out of control once the concert comes to an end.

Sometimes the attempts to create this tension feel ham-fisted. Every character in the movie loves to remark on what a good dad he is. You know, in case we didn’t get that he’s a good dad and it’s about him being a good dad even though he’s a serial killer. But if you go into an M. Night joint expecting the narrative to be subtle, that’s really on you. Compared to some of his other fatherhood-forward films, he demonstrates a level of restraint here I appreciate: at least no one looks into the camera directly to explain the metaphor in this one. (I’m still a little burnt by Knock at the Cabin, I’ll admit it.) Trap also functions as a compelling dissection of fatherhood, and particularly the construction of the father figure. Cooper’s personality is carefully bifurcated: the “monster” that must be sated, and the good dad, who’s taking his kid to basically an Eras Tour concert, trying desperately to give her a good memory. 

In Trap, Shyamalan also seems to be embracing the more absurd elements of his story writing in a refreshing way. There’s an inherent goofiness to the plot, and he doesn’t shy away from this. During the concert sequence, there’s a couple of scenes where Cooper encounters the mother of one of his daughter’s friends (played excellently by Marnie McPhail.) The two girls have been having some difficulties; Riley has felt left out. For some reason, the girl’s mother, who remains unnamed, decides the best place to address this is in the hall of the concert venue, mid-concert. The absurdity of it all really works; at one point, the clearly distracted Cooper tries to brush her off, so she grabs his arm and warns him not to mess with her in front of two armed guards, as Cooper uncomfortably tries to de-escalate. It feels like this time, Shyamalan is in on the joke with his audience, while maintaining the level of sincerity I’ve come to expect and really enjoy in even my least favorite of his films. 

It’s worth noting that the pop star in Trap, Lady Raven, is played by Shyamalan’s eldest daughter Saleka, whose debut album was released in 2022. Saleka wrote 14 original songs for the movie, and performs them all. It’s maybe unsurprising that the best parts of the film happen during the concert, which feels like a real concert; each song in the setlist is polished, with its own choreography. And honestly? The songs are a bop. I’ll be picking up the album.

That said, it feels at times like the movie was written for her, with increasingly convoluted ways to keep Lady Raven relevant in the story. A lot of those moments work well—Saleka sells it—but the back half could have benefited from a little trimming down. And as the vestiges of Cooper’s control of the situation slip away, so does the impact of the exploration of fatherhood. There’s a vague gesture at redemption (or rather, its complete impossibility), but once Cooper’s lives collide, the film loses interest in engaging meaningfully with what that means for Cooper-as-a-father in the aftermath.

On the other hand, a story about fatherhood, and preserving the image of yourself as the ideal father in your daughter’s eyes, being conducted through a movie that was made in collaboration between a father and daughter? It’s a great metanarrative. It’s perfectly M. Night “Girl Dad” Shyamalan. I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

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