You learn a lot about a filmmaker just by observing what they’re interested in – even more so, what they’re not. In Trap, the latest film from M Night Shyamalan, the Indian-American director, 53, gives away a lot about himself. Maybe even more than he realises.
Warning: this article contains spoilers
It all started with the trailer, which gave away the film’s biggest twist. In it, we meet a father attending a pop concert with his daughter. Also in attendance are hundreds of police officers, all there to attempt to catch the city’s most notorious serial killer. The father is concerned, not because of the safety of his daughter, but because he is, in fact, the serial killer in question.
Shyamalan is a storyteller known for his love of a good twist, dating back to his breakthrough film, The Sixth Sense, which was released 25 years ago on Tuesday. But his twist films increasingly don’t operate like others that rely on that plot device. In the hands of other renowned storytellers, a twist is a beautiful watch face that, once removed, reveals the careful engineering underneath. Trap isn’t particularly well-engineered, and that’s because its director is not much of a machinist. He’s more of an emotionalist. He goes with his gut and follows his feelings.
He’s not mapping all of this out and working backwards like Alfred Hitchcock or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He’s more like Stephen King – he finds the ending when he gets there. Even The Sixth Sense was constructed that way, as he stumbled on the twist, he later revealed, long into the writing process.
And for a serial killer movie, Trap is also surprisingly uncompelled by the business of serial killing. In it, Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, also known as the Butcher because of the horrible way he carves up his victims. That’s what we’re told, anyway. We never see any of the murders – this is a bloodless affair. Our thrills, and our chills, are to be had elsewhere.
What is Trap interested in? Fatherhood. Perhaps that’s why the film feels like the most wholesome thriller in recent memory – not to mention the funniest. In the place of gruesome kills are doting exchanges between Cooper and his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue).
Cooper is ostensibly a sociopath, but it’s hard to buy into that when he’s so palpably concerned about being a good dad – making sure that she’s having a great time, that she’s safe, that his own needs don’t outshine hers. The film is also conspicuously fixated on the pop star performing in the background, known as Lady Raven.
In the film’s first big twist, the singer is revealed to be a conscious part of the investigation – immersed in every profiling detail that the detectives are using and willing to put her life on the line to help others. Cooper then reveals to her that he is the Butcher, utilising her star power to get him and his daughter out of the stadium – right after he earns his daughter a moment to dance on stage with her hero.
All of this is important to note because of who’s playing Lady Raven – Saleka Shyamalan, the director’s 28-year-old aspiring pop star daughter.
According to the filmmaker, the idea for the film began with this collaboration in mind, with him wanting to create a film that could bring to life an album that his daughter would produce, in the vein of Prince’s autobiographical film and subsequent career-defining album Purple Rain.
Shyamalan is practically begging us to draw parallels between himself and his character. Cooper is a man torn between his double life, worried above all else that his all-consuming job will tear him away from his family. He feels guilt, putting it all on the line so that he can give his daughter the best day of her life.
In interviews over the years, Shyamalan has often talked about the emotional roots of each story. When he was writing Old, for example, released in 2021, he was consumed by the fear of ageing, watching his father slowly slip away in front of him from dementia. The Village was about parents trying to protect their children from the outside world, which he’d made early in his fatherhood.
What scares Shyamalan now? Losing the respect of his adult daughters. That much is clear in the film’s next big twist, in which it’s revealed that Cooper’s wife is the one who tipped off the police. Cooper is filled with an anger he’s never experienced, he explains, because this might rob him of his relationship with his children. It’s the one thing he can’t bear to lose.
There’s a surprising sweetness to it all and it makes you forgive the fact that Saleka isn’t up to the task at hand from an acting perspective. It’s also why it’s hard to be mad at the nepotism in play in the film Shyamalan produced earlier this year, The Watchers, directed by his other daughter Ishana, 24.
This is a man who’s doing everything in his power, risking his own standing in Hollywood, to help his daughters achieve their dreams. Maybe it’s all a mea culpa for his absence in their early lives when he was off for months at a time making films. That seems to be what he’s wrestling with in Trap – with the film serving as both an act of reflection and a salve for his past sins.
Shyamalan reportedly said Hartnett visited The Watchers set before Trap went into production. The two talked for hours about fatherhood and the fact that Hartnett had consciously stepped away from Hollywood to start a family impressed him – and helped land him the role.
Trap lacks much of what made films of its ilk great, but it’s never boring and that’s not only because Shyamalan has a way of always keeping you guessing. He puts so much of himself into this film and that earnestness does a lot to fill in the cracks.
Trap is in cinemas now across the Middle East
