You Better Not Kill the Groove
By Juan Barquin
Trap
Dir. M. Night Shyamalan, U.S., Warner Bros.
In his conversations with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock remarked on the failure of his film Stage Fright as owing to its breaking something he considered an unwritten law: “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.” Truffaut echoed this notion, “The better the villain, the better the picture: that’s an excellent formula.”
This certainly could have applied to any one of Hitchcock’s features, from Shadow of a Doubt’s Uncle Charlie and Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers to Norman Bates and even to the inhuman killers in The Birds. These villains often exist in plain sight, disguising themselves as “normal” in a world where “otherness” is monstrous, and the best of them know just how to maintain that façade in the most stressful of scenarios.
M Night Shyamalan’s Trap, like so many of his films, emphasizes Hitchcock’s law of villainy. It’s a film with a decidedly simple premise: a serial killer named Cooper, aka The Butcher (Josh Hartnett), attends a Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) concert with his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), only to realize he’s surrounded by a police force led by a profiler (Hayley Mills) trying to catch him. But just as Hitchcock noted that the best suspense comes from letting the audience in on the secret, Shyamalan forces the viewer to wait, wonder, and witness as Trap’s villain protagonist navigates his escape from the trap that has been set for him.
Trap repeats itself over and over, introducing new obstacles for Cooper and allowing him to wriggle out of them. It’s a formula that is riveting for the grand majority of the film; Shyamalan mines every possible inconvenience and opportunity that could exist in the single setting of a concert arena. Practically each minute of Trap is designed to place one inside the headspace of our villain, exquisitely performed by Harnett, delivering the kind of cockiness and nervous excitement that John Dall radiated in Hitchcock’s Rope. Hartnett effortlessly toggles between the goofiness of a doting father—echoing Shyamalan himself making a film loosely as a means of highlighting his daughter and her art—and the cruelty of a monster trying to ensure he can go on to kill another day.
Perspective is key to Shyamalan’s work, with great attention to how form and content intersect. This ranges from the playfulness of the camera in The Sixth Sense, sometimes moving alongside the characters to mimic their states of mind, to the way certain works emphasize the limitation of what’s in the frame and how that relates to the characters, as with The Village’s blind protagonist, Ivy, and what she can directly sense. This sometimes veers into metatextuality, as with Lady in the Water, which is all about casting people in preordained roles with Shyamalan himself as the storyteller (whose ideas would, one day, be too controversial for the world to handle).
Trap follows suit as a film enriched by both Shyamalan’s formal playfulness and the dedication to his pet themes, with parental anxieties being at the forefront. Beyond the filmmaker perhaps projecting his own anxieties of not doing enough for his children, distracted by his own projects (much like Cooper is consistently preoccupied with his own escape), Trap builds in key subplots emphasizing that Cooper’s skillfulness and self-interest can occasionally extend to helping his daughter. Whether it’s dealing with a schoolmate’s annoying parent or getting Riley onstage to dance with Lady Raven, his schemes are designed to take the gaze of those around him and place them onto others.
Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera takes its cues from this: where Cooper’s face is often framed in a tight close-up (one of Shyamalan’s late career trends), emphasizing his near-perfect façade of normalcy, he is also pushed to the very edges of the frame when he proves successful at diverting attention. Riley’s onstage dance with Lady Raven, which Cooper has brilliantly orchestrated, is one such example: no one notices the man quietly standing backstage when they’re all focused on the unfolding spectacle, blown up on an LED screen right next to him for all to see. In spite of the viewer knowing the man is a menace, he imagines himself as one who can avoid any obstacle, and that very sociopathy bleeds into the film’s formal texture. This results in an entertaining experience, but it’s also a testament to Shyamalan’s ability to provide narrative information visually rather than through dialogue.
At one point, Trap dramatically shifts gears, extending its perspective beyond that of Cooper and onto supporting characters whose presence has been near nonexistent. Some might consider this shift to be a subversion, asking whether our interest should be in Cooper’s success. How do the people around a murderer react to the idea that they are in his presence? But it comes across as something of a betrayal of what the film has already homed in on. The last act, which places equal focus on Lady Raven and Cooper’s wife Rachel (Alison Pill), is a fumble, as though the filmmaker was trying to find a place for more of his pet themes, but he couldn’t manage to flesh them out in such a short span of time.
Take Shyamalan’s interest in self-sacrifice, presented here through Lady Raven placing herself directly in Cooper’s crosshairs in order to help capture him and try to save the man he is holding captive. This isn’t far from the way various Shyamalan protagonists have behaved—from The Village’s Ivy to Knock at the Cabin’s Eric— but the difference is that these films were built around those characters and their sacrifice was a foundation of the narrative. Similarly, Rachel navigates her complicity and sole attempt to challenge her husband without his knowledge, though her character is introduced too late for this to make much of an impact. Pill’s performance is compelling on its own terms, and she's accompanied by Mukdeeprom’s most playful shot/reverse shots, but her arc feels out of place, falling into the dialogue-heavy terrain that Shyamalan had been smartly avoiding.
Does the film's shift enrich what came before, or does this last act distract from what was working so well? So many of his late film reveals (often mistaken for twists), like those of The Sixth Sense or The Visit, lend their films power by recontextualizing what we have seen. Trap’s have little to no depth beyond cheap thrills. The film’s perspectival shift not only removes the tense environment of the concert but also trades in its economical visual storytelling for rote exposition that strips its protagonist and its camera of whatever power they wielded.
Trap is ultimately not dissimilar from Brian De Palma’s Hitchcockian riff Snake Eyes (1998), down to the final act fumble. Its narrative pivot will appeal to some, but it’s frustrating coming after a streak of films (The Visit, Split, Glass, Old, and Knock at the Cabin) that all managed to balance thrills with his brand of sincere melodrama, grounded in a humane interest in how people interact in perilous situations. If Shyamalan’s films are about finding the humanity in anyone, even those who we perceive as monstrous (like Split’s “villain,” afflicted with dissociative identity disorder), Trap offered him the possibility of committing to a villainous perspective.
Trap seems mostly designed to play into the idea of how easy it for a smart, charismatic white man to avoid capture amidst a sea of suspects. An audience doesn't want to watch him face his familial mistakes or be handed nonsensical psychobabble about his tortured past. Viewers no longer live in an era where filmmakers are beholden to the same moral codes that Hitchcock was once limited by, controlling how much monstrosity can be shown on screen. Trap deserves a final act that leans into its cruelty, revealing The Butcher's absurd skills at evading capture. Perhaps the final shot—a smirk echoing that of Anthony Perkins at the end of Psycho—will be enough for some, but it's a shame Shyamalan had to meander so long before getting there.