Trap Review | A Middling Psychological Thriller With a Solid Josh Hartnett

Trap, the new M Night Shyamalan film starring Josh Hartnett, has an enticing premise. When you watch the trailer of Trap, that feels like the perfect example of how to pitch your script to any producer. And when I saw the film’s trailer, I was disappointed because I thought they had revealed the entire film. But the problem with the movie is that whatever we have not seen in the trailer, which is like 3/4th of the film, looks less convincing, and with too many convenient turns in favor of the main character, Trap ends up looking like a missed opportunity.

So, Cooper, our main man, is out with his elder daughter Riley for a concert by the artist Lady Raven. At the crowded stadium that hosted the event, Cooper noticed the presence of the Police and SWAT team, and he eventually understood that this whole event was a setup to  trap a psycho killer the police called the butcher. SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen the trailer yet. Cooper is the butcher, and now he needs to find a way to get out of there without getting caught. How he manages to do that is what we see in M Night Shyamalan’s Trap.

From the moment Cooper starts to think about escaping from the place, the script struggles to find convincing ways to pull it off. There are occasional moments of failed attempts of Cooper, which sort of gives you an impression that Shyamalan, who has written this film, is trying to make things feel real. But, whenever Cooper succeeds, for instance, when he pulls off an emotional stunt to convince Lady Raven’s uncle to make Riley appear on the main stage, things start to look clumsy. Even when the movie moves out of the concert and goes to a confined place, you are left with many logical questions like what is Raven’s personal security guy doing all that time.

Josh Hartnett is really good at pulling off the dual shades of his character in a seamless way. There are no major visible transformations in his body language. But those subtle changes in his eyes and that smile, which looks creepy only when you know who he really is, make the performance look convincing and the character menacing. Ariel Donoghue, as Riley, was fine in her role. Shyamalan has given a meaty role to his daughter Saleka Shyamalan, who plays the part of Lady Raven. The performance is good, and in the last quarter of the film, she is getting considerable screen time.

M Night Shyamalan depends on the visual storytelling part of the craft, mostly in building the main character. One can see striking usage of close-up shots with less depth of field, frames with a lot of negative space, etc., to depict the character’s psyche. Even in building tension, Shyamalan is not opting for the conventional goriness. It was almost like he was preserving the butcher act for a possible sequel. As I already said, the flaws are mostly in the writing that is sort of helping the central character to do some stuff to attain certain drama. But rather than getting to feel that wow factor, we tend to question the plausibility of that.

Trap is pretty fascinating on a one-liner level. But when it comes to the development on a writing level, the film is finding it difficult to include coherent possibilities to take the story forward. With a sense of eeriness throughout the narrative, along with a top-notch performance from Josh Hartnett, Trap is a watchable thriller with plenty of scope for improvement.