‘Trap’ Review
From Shyamalanaissance to Hartnettaissance.
TRAP IS THE LATEST FROM M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN, who has settled into an almost perfect groove of watchable-but-silly, entertaining-but-not-quite-good movies these last few years.
2021’s Old, the movie about the beach that makes you old? Dumb, but fun! 2023’s Knock at the Cabin, the movie about a band of cultists who attempt to convince a family to sacrifice one of the family’s own in order to save the world from the apocalypse? Interesting and moving, but also kind of frustrating. And now 2024’s Trap, the movie about a serial killer at a concert that the police have surrounded in order to (you guessed it) trap him? Knowingly idiotic and violative of its premise, but still absurdly entertaining because it’s carried by a berserker performance from star Josh Hartnett.
Much has been made of the Shyamalanaissance—which began with 2015’s The Visit and marked a return to form of sorts for the director, who delivered a series of huge hits from 1999 to 2002 then seemed to have lost his way a bit with big-budget flops like After Earth and The Last Airbender—though it’s hard to argue with a straight face that his recent run matches the greatness of his turn-of-the-century trifecta, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs. Split is probably the closest he’s gotten, and even then, a large portion of the excitement derived from its connection to Unbreakable. Still, there’s something to be said for well-crafted schlock, and whatever else you might say about the storytelling flaws in his recent films, they’re nothing if not well crafted.
Trap continues that tradition of visual excellence. The guy knows how to block a shot and convey information seamlessly through movement of the camera. Consider the moment in Trap where Cooper (Josh Hartnett) decides he wants to access the roof, so he (and the camera) start looking around, and he sees a deep fryer and some glass bottles of oil, and he (through the camera, meaning we) pieces together how to create a distraction to gain the access. The camera moves fluidly, around counters, looking over edges, panning over to see where danger might come; rather than statically conveying information by setting up, cutting, setting up, cutting, ad nauseam, Shyamalan keeps us connected, keeps us invested, builds the tension. It’s De Palma-esque, which means it’s also Hitchcockian, so much so that when Shyamalan breaks out the split diopter you might well snap your fingers and point at the screen.
It’s also Spielbergian: Shyamalan understands intuitively how to move a camera and keep people engaged in moments that otherwise might be a bit dull or expository as well as anyone since Steven Spielberg. And, like Spielberg, Shyamalan is a great director of actors: He understands as well as anyone I can think of both when to restrain them and when to let them off the leash. The man got a career-best performance out of Haley Joel Osment when he was 10 in The Sixth Sense and what is arguably a career-best performance out of Bruce Willis when he was 45 in Unbreakable. Then there’s James McAvoy’s performance in Split. McAvoy wasn’t entirely a stranger to getting weird (see 2013’s Filth for proof), but he was typically a bit more buttoned down. Shyamalan seemed to unlock something inside McAvoy with Split, in which he played a serial killer with multiple personalities; veering wildly from meek child to monstrous murderer, the Scotsman dominated the screen.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO JOSH HARTNETT. I’ve always had a soft spot for Hartnett: from the brooding bad boy in The Faculty to the straitlaced Army Ranger in Black Hawk Down to the Alaska cop facing down a vampire invasion in 30 Days of Night, his squinty glare brought something interesting to the table. But he wasn’t done many favors by the movie business’s efforts to cram him into the standard leading-man slot in films like Hollywood Homicide, Pearl Harbor, and 40 Days and 40 Nights, and seemed to burn out a bit. Hartnett has worked relatively steadily, but for a long while it was in smaller stuff you probably haven’t seen.
In recent years, Hartnett has made a comeback. Supporting parts in two Guy Ritchie films (Wrath of Man and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre); an episode of Black Mirror; a one-scene hit on The Bear; and, most notably, as Ernest Lawrence in Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, Oppenheimer. It was, naturally, the best-picture-winning blockbuster that made people sit up and say “Oh yeah, Josh Hartnett! He’s good in this as the buttoned-up scientist/bureaucrat annoyed with Oppie for dabbling in commie gobbledygook that will keep him off the A-bomb project. Where’s he been?”
If Trap works at all—and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure it does, in no small part because Shyamalan’s script abandons the tension-building one-location premise about two-thirds of the way through, widening the scope of the picture away from an escape pic/father-daughter bonding sesh and trying to make us care about a bunch of characters we have no reason to care about—it works because Shyamalan saw Hartnett’s innate twitchy weirdness and let him off the chain.
A great deal of this movie is shot in either medium close-up or tight close-up on Hartnett: We’re medium when he’s working his way through a crowd and we’re compelled to watch his fake smile, his efforts to allay any concern from those around him, just waiting for the moment when he can’t do it anymore and goes stony. We switch to full when he’s in one-on-one conversation, and it’s here, his face taking up the entire screen, that you can see the crazy trying to break through. The whole thing is chilling, a masterclass in constructed empathy sliding away into unmasked contempt. Hartnett’s Cooper is fidgety without being mannered, his tics feeling less contrived than barely under control; this is sometimes a difficult circle to square for an actor. Compare Hartnett’s work here with Jake Gyllenhaal’s as Det. Loki in Prisoners. While I generally like Gyllenhaal (and even enjoy his work in Prisoners), it often feels like he’s thinking “How do I make this character stand out?” rather than letting his nature emerge.
Cooper code-switches from suburban dad to stone-cold psycho effortlessly, though not without cost to the character. This is going to sound mildly deranged, but there’s a genuinely touching moment late in the film when he’s discussing how he kept his two lives—what you might call his family and, uh, professional lives—separate and what about his family life that he’ll miss most if they collide in a way that brings it all crashing down. Maybe it’s just a function of having aged with (or, I suppose, just behind) Hartnett over all these years, but rarely have I felt better represented onscreen than with Cooper, awkward Dad, trying to make his teen daughter feel supported and safe.
Trap is absurd and doesn’t entirely get a pass by leaning into that absurdity; on a pure storytelling level, it’s hard to recommend. But movies are more than their plots, and you’ll rarely find yourself bored when you sit down for a Shyamalan picture. Plus: Trap is a key text in the coming Hartnettaissance. And for that, we should be thankful.