Shyamalan’s Best Movie in Ages

All through the early years of his career, M. Night Shyamalan was flattered with (and dogged by) comparisons to the great Alfred Hitchcock. The comparisons were reasonable, but never quite right. Yes, Shyamalan, like Hitchcock, made twisty suspense movies. But unlike Hitchcock, Shyamalan’s almost always came with some sort of supernatural bent. The guy was dead all along. The dude who survived a terrible train crash was an honest-to-god superhero. The apocalypse begins, and only one couple’s noble sacrifice can stop it.

Alfred Hitchcock would never have made The Sixth Sense, or Unbreakable, or Knock at the Cabin. But he might have made Trap, the latest and most overtly Hitchcockian thriller Shyamalan’s ever made. In a sense, Hitchcock did make it, because Trap is a clever combination of a whole bunch of different Hitchcock movies, including Psycho, Frenzy, Suspicion, and Rope.

From the latter, Shyamalan borrows the premise of a lurid, murderous melodrama largely set in a single location. In the case of Trap, the location is a Philadelphia sports arena on the day it hosts a concert by a well-known pop star named Lady Raven (Shyamalan’s own daughter Saleka, who is a budding musician in her own right). Among the thousands of attendees at the concert, Shyamalan narrows in on just two: A rabid teenage fan named Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett).

READ MORE: Every M. Night Shyamalan Twist, Ranked From Worst to Best

Speaking here as the father of a music-loving kid named Riley, I can say this with some authority: There’s just something a little off about this Cooper guy. No dad of kids this age is this chipper, this patient, this darn nice when he gets dragged to a pop concert he has zero interest in. You’d have to be crazy to be this upbeat about all this.

Sure enough, Cooper harbors a dark secret, although Shyamalan reveals it to the audience fairly quickly: Cooper is actually “The Butcher,” an infamous serial killer who’s claimed 12 victims, and already has a 13th locked away in an undisclosed location. During the concert, Cooper fakes a trip to the bathroom, so he can get some sadistic jollies monitoring his captive via a secret app on his cell phone.

Cooper is clearly a skillful and deceptive psychopath, and it’s not long before he notices an unusually large police presence at this Lady Raven concert. Buddying up to a sociable merch salesman (Jonathan Langdon), Cooper learns that the show is actually a giant trap designed to catch the Butcher. Somehow, the cops learned that he would be in attendance at Lady Raven’s show and hatched a plan to catch him as he leaves. There are officers posted at every exit. SWAT teams patrol the rooftops. Teams are grabbing any adult man who even vaguely matches the Butcher’s description — and there aren’t that many of them at a pop concert for teenage girls! — for questioning. Meanwhile, an FBI profiler (Hayley Mills) anticipates Cooper’s every move. There’s really might be no way out.

It’s not just that Shyamalan has cooked up a fairly engrossing (and non-supernatural) premise that gives Trap such old school Hitchcock-y vibes. He’s also borrowed all sorts of tricks from the Master of Suspense. Hitch loved to force an audience to identify with criminal, as Shyamalan does here. He was also pathologically paranoid about the police, supposedly dating back to an incident from his own childhood where his father convinced the local precinct to lock little Alfred up to teach him a lesson. In Trap, everywhere Cooper turns, he’s hounded by faceless mobs of cops.

Hitchcock also loved to temper disturbing moments with dark humor, which Shyamalan does repeatedly in Trap. He fills the margins of the story with all sorts of quirky supporting characters, and he constantly forces Cooper to choose between indulging his taste for violence or maintaining his facade of non-threatening middle-aged dadhood — as when that friendly merch salesman hooks Cooper up with a T-shirt, and simultaneously hands him an enormous box cutter.

Shyamalan also gets a terrific lead performance out of Hartnett, who manages to find just the right balance between disturbing — and Cooper is often genuinely scary — and hilariously funny, as when Cooper accidentally walks into a nest of waiting SWAT snipers and has to think up a convincing lie on the spot. Cooper is sure to become one of the actor’s signature roles.

While it looked like Trap’s trailers gave away most of its surprises, the movie kept a bunch of tricks up its sleeve that weren’t even hinted that in its marketing. I will not spoil them here, although I will say I am not entirely certain all of the later surprises work, or that all of the supporting players are giving performances of the same caliber as Hartnett.

Still, I appreciated the fact that I could never anticipate where Trap was headed. This, too, reminded me of Hitchcock, who always had a knack for knowing what to tell an audience to get them in the theater, and what to withhold from them in order to elicit the proper reaction. Back in the day, the endless comparisons between Shyamalan and Hitchcock felt like a bit of a trap themselves.  With Trap, though, there’s no point trying to escape them.

Additional Thoughts:

-Casting Hayley Mills — AKA the star of the original Parent Trap — in his own movie called Trap that is about a parent who is also a serial killer might be the funniest thing in any Shyamalan film.

-You can call Shyamalan casting his up-and-coming musician daughter as the world’s biggest pop star nepotism. You could also argue that in a movie about the extreme lengths a loving father will go to in order to indulge his daughter, it was the only thematically appropriate choice.

-As the dad of a sweet girl named Riley, who takes her to things I have absolutely zero interest in, who tries to encourage her passions even when they seem far-fetched, who would do almost anything to protect her from hurt or harm, who has been known to get frustrated at the parents of her friends when they do things to upset her, but who is absolutely not a serial killer, I must tell you I nonetheless did find a fair amount of this movie quite relatable.

RATING: 7/10