Flasz On Film

The following text contains plot spoilers from the film Trap, which at the time of writing is still playing on cinema screens, so as a measure of personal courtesy to those wishing to read on, I am hereby warning you that you might read what you won’t be able to unread. Take a hint from the star rating below and watch the movie first. Five stars. Chef’s kiss. Go see it. Then come back and read why you should like it more.

The career of one M. Night Shyamalan can only be described as a rollercoaster of emotional experiences and even as I am typing those words I am experiencing a strange déjà vu because something tells me this isn’t the first time I have opened an article or a review of a Shyamalan movie with those words. But you know what? Ancient Greeks believed Gods resided at the top of Mount Olympus, a perfectly climbable mountain, and they never bothered to check. I’d have been one of those ancient Greeks because I’m not in the mood to go back and look at all my Shyamalan texts (and there aren’t that many of them, though he’s probably a director I have written about the most, come to think of it) and check if this opening line features somewhere in there, so I cede this responsibility onto any reader with a penchant for fact-checking. So, let’s just plough on, shall we?

Shyamalan has always remained an interesting filmmaker in my estimation for a variety of reasons, especially because even his most critically derided works tend to offer some value to me as a writer and maker-upper of things about movies the filmmakers may or may not have intended. He’s an artist of many interests whose movies almost always contain at least one false bottom and can be read in multiple ways, depending on the angle assumed by the interpreter. More importantly, however, he’s an artist who likes to remain a few steps ahead of the viewer and the critic. Paradoxically though, he’s also an artist who likes to indulge in his proclivities which invites those viewers and critics to quickly make assessments and form expectations regarding his work. There’s a reason he had become “the twist guy” and that’s because he clearly enjoyed leaning into the magicianship of storytelling, setting the stage for a big reveal and then pulling the rug from under the hopefully unsuspecting viewer.

But people are not stupid and even the most egregious simpletons can spot a simple trend when it’s slapped across the screen in front of them. It took but four films for people to openly expect stuff not to be what it seems, build up expectations and then emerge disappointed. After all, as Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre, the idea of a monster behind the closed door can never be matched by the reveal of what the monster is. Imagination builds him up to be bigger and scarier than anything the storyteller could ever come up with.

Long story short, Shyamalan went into hiding for a little while and re-emerged in the recent decade only to see the cycle repeat because—again—cinemagoers have become even more sophisticated over the years and better trained in spotting thematic symmetries and the like, so it only took them a minute to clue into the fact the new and improved Shyamalan who came back swinging with The Visit, Split, Glass, Old and most recently Knock at the Cabin is thematically driven by the notions of faith as well as fear for the survival of the human species. Therefore, at this point the viewers were probably expecting a movie they could pre-interpret or build some expectations towards because the filmmaker in question is known for finding a groove and sticking with it.

Thing is, the filmmaker knows he is perceived as such and even his work alone (Lady in the Water being a prime example) can be seen as incredibly self-aware. And as I remarked above, Shyamalan is fond of the notion of staying a few steps ahead of the audience. Old habits die hard, I guess. That’s the old Hitchcockian student peering through, if anything. Therefore, his newest movie, Trap, should be viewed as way more than just another Shyamalan movie, or another strong exercise in his indiosyncratic style, or another puzzle box perhaps reconnecting him to his days of yore. Trap is way more interesting than that. It’s a puzzle box with a false bottom which communicates to the viewer not only that the filmmaker is onto us but that he still has a few tricks up his sleeve and he remains firmly engaged with the notion of staying at least a few steps ahead of us… as any magician worth his weight in salt would.

Look, the clue is even in the title. Trap. Sure, on face level, the title refers to the central conceit of the film where a massive concert is staged (in the middle of the afternoon, mind you, which is at the very least bizarre because I have never been to a gig where I’d leave the venue and still make it back home for dinner) by the city authorities—on this occasion I am told Toronto pretends to be Philadelphia—to trap a serial killer called The Butcher (how original, not very Shyamalan-like… or is it?) who is said to be in attendance. The filmmaker lets us in on a secret early on and reveals the identity of the killer who also happens to be the film’s protagonist, Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a middle-aged dad on a day out with his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue). And the story goes from there as we hang onto Cooper’s shoulder while the noose around him tightens just as imperceptibly as the noose of Hitchockian suspense tightening around the movie… and as the filmmaker’s grip tightens around our necks as well.

Shyamalan plays all the familiar chords. You’ve got your split screens harking back to De Palma and maybe setting a critic or two on a mission to write a piece on how Trap is Shyamalan’s Snake Eyes. You’ve got the idiosyncratic humour, corny jokes and instances of stilted delivery which are bound to send Shyamalan detractors into an I’ve-seen-it-all-before tailspin with their eyes rolled all the way back as if to inspect the contents of their skulls, while successfully pulling wool over the eyes of diehard Shyapologists. And above all, you’ve got the puzzle box, an invitation to figure out what’s going on, how the filmmaker is going to pull the rug from under us and how we can outpace him and leave the cinema with our chest swollen in pride, thinking we’ve figured everything out at least a few seconds before the grand reveal.

Because surely—surely!!—there must be a twist somewhere in there because otherwise where would all those breadcrumbs lead? There must be a payoff coming at some point because the shifting ground under Cooper’s feet is going to corner him, right? Surely! Because why install a character of the ominous-looking FBI profiler Dr Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills)? This whole thing must be a ruse! Maybe it’s like James Mangold’s Identity and it takes place in Cooper’s head and he’s not really a bloodthirsty killer? Maybe there’s a high concept brewing somewhere in there, laid out in secret and disseminated under Shyamalan’s perfect authorial control, like in Old? After all, what is the filmmaker telling Cooper during his brief cameo in that one scene? You know the one? The sound cuts out for just a few seconds and it’s surely—surely!!—not a coincidence, no sir! I’ve seen enough Shyamalan movies to know a twist when I smell one.

And with those emotions, all heightened, excited and titillated, we enter the film’s final act where Riley goes backstage, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) ends up giving Cooper and Riley a lift home thus bypassing the tightening ring of security and we end up at Cooper’s house where the mask slips and he’s revealed to be… just a serial killer with mummy issues. Pardon, just a serial killer. Mummy issues are part of the definition of what a serial killer is, I suppose. Cooper is just a killer. Plain and simple and his wife has been in on setting up that trap at the concert. That’s it. The movie resolves in a pretty conventional way, at least as far as Shyamalan movies are concerned. Nobody finds out they’re dead. Nobody figures out they are a superhero. Nobody finds out what their mission in life is. The concert is not a front for an illegal clinical trial. The world isn’t coming to an end. The trees aren’t doing it, Billy. It’s all… a bit… underwhelming… so to speak.

Which is where I pipe up and tell you it’s all been part of the plan because the movie has a false bottom and you should head back to the cinema and watch it again having applied a filter onto the way you interpret events in the story… because Trap is first and foremost an exercise in self-awareness on behalf of the filmmaker who has a track record of indulging in the mechanics of storytelling as much as the narrative-building itself. He frequently introduces characters or scenarios where characters tell each other stories or where specific elements of the plot key to our understanding of the world built before our eyes are delivered through the act of storytelling. Hell, he made an entire movie about the magic of storytelling, which nobody but the select few (myself included) understood or loved. That’s Lady in the Water, by the way.

Sure, if you choose to take Trap on what’s delivered prima facie, then it all looks kind of conventional and maybe a bit underwhelming because the build-up—that monster ramming and scratching behind closed doors—promises to be formidable. The door opens and all we get is Josh Hartnett unravelling like Norman Bates sans wig. But it all makes sense because what the filmmaker is doing while delivering such an underwhelming crescendo to what promises a massive huzzah is playing on his nose and sticking out his tongue having outsmarted us all.

To get what’s happening and to extract the kind of enjoyment I did while watching Trap, think of Cooper as an avatar of the filmmaker himself. He’s a master storyteller with a penchant for morbid entertainment, out and about in a public setting, minding his business. And things change the minute he notices something’s out of place. He’s attuned to such things because he’s a storyteller and storytellers are secret agents whose superpowers include spotting unusual scenarios, fishing out what-if ideas and noticing interesting characters in crowds of otherwise faceless bipedal hominids. You see, this whole movie is a metaphorical reflection on the emotional state Shyamalan knows all too intimately where he feels someone somewhere is out to get him. And that whoever is trailing him knows or anticipates his next move. Therefore, that FBI profiler is essentially the critic. The cops are his fans. And Cooper’s wife? That’s an avatar for a dyed in the wool Shyapologist Judas-type who feels it’s their responsibility to take the storyteller down a peg because they don’t like the direction he’s currently pursuing. I don’t know. They have their reasons.

Figure it out and you will understand you’ve been had. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled.

Ha, that’s the first time you see someone paraphrase Malcom X in a review of a Shyamalan movie, and where this quotation doesn’t even belong! Take a bow, Jakub.

Trap is merely superficially conventional and underwhelming because once you apply this filter and understand how Shyamalan most assuredly sees himself as Cooper in this scenario and weaves this tale—builds this puzzle box—to outfox you, the viewer and the critic, who are hell-bent on outsmarting Shyamalan because you think you’ve seen enough movies to get what makes him tick, the movie will uncover its true greatness and remind you that M. Night Shyamalan has still got the chops. The dog still bites and he laughs as he does so. In fact, Cooper giggles like Joker in the film’s closing shot right after the filmmaker lets us know he’s about to break free. But the movie cuts to black before it happens.

So, yes. There’s a high concept here, even though there isn’t one. Not formally, at least. The movie assumes—correctly, in my opinion—that the audience has become sophisticated enough to figure it out but maybe not sophisticated enough to do it before the credits roll, which shall leave any critically inclined viewer to have an almighty epiphany somewhere between the time they leave the cinema and now, when they read how I lay this out for them in plain King’s English.

Trap is great. Perhaps it’s the best movie Shyamalan directed and wrote since The Village and definitely one that warrants multiple revisits, if only to bask in how effortlessly self-aware it is in the way it misdirects, misleads and playfully toys with the viewers who think they’ve seen it all before and they couldn’t possibly be outsmarted by an old dog like M. Night Shyamalan.