[COLUMN] M. Night Shyamalan's Trap is the Ultimate Dad Movie | by Darren Mooney

Psst: You know Trap? The recent M. Night Shyamalan movie? Well, the writer heard that there were people who hadn’t seen it yet. And they might be reading this essay. This entire piece? It’s a trap. There are gonna be spoilers in here. Kinda dope, isn’t it?

If nothing else, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is a movie about the eternal question of whether it is possible for a man to be a proper “girl dad” and still maintain his own hobbies and interests.

Trap opens with firefighter Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) concert. The pair bond and connect. Riley shudders as her father tries to use the word “jelly” while Cooper presses his daughter to teach him what the kids mean when they say “crispy.” Cooper worries about Riley’s social life, her relationship with her friends from school who have been very publicly excluding her from their activities.

As the pair file into the venue and move to their floor seats, Cooper begins to notice an increased security presence. Police officers appear to be picking men out of the crowd at random and taking them away. The perimeter has been secured. Cooper starts to feel claustrophobic and panicked. He excuses himself from the seat and slinks away to the toilets. In the stall, he takes out his phone and fires up a video app. It streams footage of a stranger (Mark Bacolcol) chained up in a basement.

Cooper is the Philadelphia serial killer known as “the Butcher.” The FBI has received information indicating that the Butcher will be attending this gig. “This whole concert? It’s a trap,” explains t-shirt vendor Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), delivering one of the most charming title drops in recent memory. Cooper finds himself having to think on his feet to figure out a way to escape the authorities, while two very different sides of himself – loving father and vicious serial killer – are set on a collision course.

Trap is ultimately a movie about fatherhood, both textually and subtextual. Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan is the father of three daughters. Indeed, Trap was developed as a showcase for Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka, who plays popstar Lady Raven. Saleka is a professional musician, and Shyamalan recalls Trap originating in a question he asked her: “[W]hat do you think about doing a movie that's primarily about music, where the characters are listening to a whole album?”

Shyamalan’s relationship to his daughters informs a lot of his career. Saleka was born in 1996, shortly before her father’s breakout success with The Sixth Sense. Watching Shyamalan’s films, one notices that they tend to focus on relations between adults and children: Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) and Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) in The Sixth Sense, David (Willis) and Joseph Dunn (Spencer Treat Clark) in Unbreakable, Graham (Mel Gibson) and Bo Hess (Abigail Breslin) in Signs.

“As you see each thing moving, you're seeing the girls in the movies – or the kids in the movies – are all the same ages as my kids, you know,” Shyamalan explained of his process. “Like Abigail Breslin in Signs was five when Saleka was five.” Now Shyamalan’s kids are fully grown, and being a father is a massive part of his professional output. Shyamalan even met Hartnett about casting the actor in Trap while he was in Ireland, on the set of his second daughter Ishana’s first movie, The Watchers.

However, when his kids were younger, Shyamalan struggled to integrate his personal and professional lives. Many of his early movies were adult-oriented and so not appropriate for his children. “We were very young when he was making his scary movies, so we weren’t allowed to see them,” Saleka has explained of her father’s films like The Sixth Sense or The Village. As his children got a little older, Shyamalan began to pivot towards making films that were appropriate for them.

The Lady in the Water, for example, was intended to evoke “a scary story at bedtime”, and “came out of the structure of the stories” that he told his kids. He was inspired to adapt Avatar: The Last Airbender because it was a show that his daughters loved and that the entire family would watch together. Shyamalan has spoken earnestly about how important it was that The Last Airbender remain a children’s film, remaining true to “the kids show that [his] 10-year-old [was] watching.”

At the same time, during this stretch of Shymalan’s career there was an inherent tension between the director trying to pivot into making family-friendly crowd-pleasers like Lady in the Water, The Last Airbender and After Earth and the horror filmmaker who was feeding people into lawnmowers in The Happening. It feels like this tension is woven into the fabric of Trap, which is the story of a man trying to be a good father while also finding some outlets for his freakier impulses.

“I think there are two sides of me,” Shyamalan told Vulture in 2017, promoting Split. “There is that Stuart Little side, and the darker side, and they coexist. So when you see a thriller [of mine], you’re still going to see the humanity and the emotion that one would normally associate with family films. Then when my kids were smaller, I went and did family films.” As Shyamalan’s family has gotten older, it’s been harder to keep those sides separate. In 2013, Shyamalan literally mortgaged his family home to fund The Visit.

In Trap, Cooper ultimately ends up bringing his serial killing home with him. When Lady Raven comes back to his house, Cooper locks his family in Riley’s bedroom so that he can deal with the meddling popstar. However, he is shocked at how easily they escape. “Hn,” he pauses. “Riley’s bedroom has a window. There’s a tree outside. Never looked at this house through that lens. Always kept the two lives separate.” Cooper repeatedly comes back to the idea of his “two lives”, as they implode.

Shyamalan has described himself as “a silly, fun-loving guy”, and that energy bleeds through into Trap. The film is goofy and surreal, taking familiar clichés of modern fatherhood – How does a modern parent balance work and family? How strange does it feel to be a grown man at a Taylor Swift concert? Wouldn’t any father be angry if his daughter was being bullied? – and escalating them to an almost comedic degree. Cooper’s job is serial killing. The entire concert is a police sting operation. Cooper’s rage is quite literally murderous.

One of the interesting tensions with Shyamalan as a director – and a balance that his films don’t always successfully strike – is that fine line between his playful dad energy and his aching paternal earnestness. Old is about “the beach that makes you old”, but it’s also about the feeling of watching one’s kids grow up too fast. Knock at the Cabin is about the sacrifices that parents make for children, but it’s also a high-concept single-location thriller.

Trap works as well as it does because Shyamalan has fun with the stuff that he should be having fun with and to circle back around to heartfelt sincerity towards the things that actually matter, with Hartnett skillfully able to vacillate between the two. Indeed, some of the jokes in Trap feel so esoteric that they seem to exist almost entirely for Shyamalan himself. FBI profiler Josephine Grant is played by Hayley Mills, star of the original Parent Trap. She is, once again, setting a Trap for a parent.

Shyamalan has always been more of a formalist than his reputation as the “what a twist!” guy would suggest. Trap takes its cues from Hitchcock and DePalma, even employing DePalma’s signature split diopter at various points and underscoring a tense dinner table conversation with the whistle of a boiling kettle. Just as Hitchcock played with the audience in Psycho by asking them to sympathize with – and even root for – Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), Shyamalan constructs Trap in such a way that the audience spends a lot of the runtime thrilling at a serial killer’s ingenuity, hoping that Cooper can escape.

There’s a clever recurring motif, with Shyamalan literally placing the audience in Cooper’s perspective, looking at other characters – and looking at Cooper – head on. These compositions are at times positively Kubrickian, symmetrical and clean, reflecting Cooper’s obsessive compulsive disorder. However, as the pressure builds and Cooper gradually comes undone, these point-of-view shots start to drift. They move off-center. It is really good and effective visual storytelling.

There is a self-awareness here, particularly in the juxtaposition of teenage girls’ pop fandom with middle-aged men’s obsession with true crime. One of the movie’s funnier jokes concerns the relentless exposition provided by Jamie, an obsessive who has been “following [the Butcher] for his last twelve victims” as if discussing a popstar. Trap wonders whether it’s a little weird that people are so excited by this sort of stuff, as the work of a filmmaker who is obviously excited by this sort of stuff.

Trap gets very silly very quickly, but it works because there is a strange sincerity underpinning it. The film captures a warmth and humanity to both the on-screen relationship between Cooper and Riley and the off-screen dynamic between M. Night and Saleka. Indeed, Lady Raven even gives a speech on stage about forgiving her father, and there’s a quick shot of the character using an inhaler – just like Saleka does in real life.

Throughout Trap, there are little moments that suggest Cooper’s genuine love of his daughter. He seems really proud of her when she casually makes friends with the girls in the seats next to them. There’s a lovely moment when Lady Raven asks the audience to forgive those who have wronged them, and to raise their phones if they can. Riley raises her phone, signifying that she can forgive her friends for their bullying of her. Cooper – who cannot forgive them for the same sin – seems truly moved by this.

In some ways, this is a classic M. Night Shyamalan motif. In Shyamalan’s films, the kids are often more together than the parents. In The Sixth Sense, Cole guides Malcolm to the realization that he needs to move on. In Unbreakable, Joseph convinces his father David to use his power for good. Here, Riley is a much better person than her father will ever be. There’s a metatextual subtext to the third act, in which Cooper meets his match in Lady Raven, played by Shyamalan’s own daughter.

In its own way, this is all as strange and surreal as the heightened Hitchcock and DePalma stroytelling around it. However, it’s also endearingly sincere. Trap is a story about a father who really loves his daughter, told by a father who really loves his daughter. Trap is deeply silly in its premise, meticulous about its obsessions, playful in its sensibility, funny in its own esoteric way and achingly earnest in execution. It is, in every possible sense, a dad movie.