Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
For its first hour you're watching Trap and thinking, all right, this is M. Night Shyamalan in the groove, working a tight self-contained situation and exploiting every possibility in a clean, precisely-framed way. Then the movie leaves its contained space, some of the air leaks out of the room, and you wonder where we're going. The "plausibilists," as Alfred Hitchcock called them, will be up in arms. But the movie's final act is more interesting than what's come before, and more radical, too.
The contained space: an arena where good-guy-bordering-on-doofus Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his adolescent daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert. Onstage is Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan's daughter Saleka, who also composed the songs), a teen idol in the mold of—well, you can fill in the name of a dozen pop stars. Shyamalan's big reveal comes about 20 minutes into the story rather than in the final scene this time, so it's almost impossible to talk about the movie without spoiling it (it's not really a spoiler anyway), but we can say that the arena has been filled with law enforcement, the better to catch a serial killer known as The Butcher, who is definitely inside the place.
This suspense mechanism is so deftly handled it almost brings tears to your eyes, at least if you have any feeling for film form. Shyamalan designs the mouse trap, then explores the corners of the device, letting you know where the cheese is and how many barriers there are to its successful acquisition. (And yes, sure, some of this is cheesy.) In Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books, part of the illicit pleasure is following a psychopath who tries to find a solution to the problem at hand—sometimes logically, sometimes impulsively—and seeing how that works out. Problem-solving. It's one of the main illicit pleasures of this movie, too.
And yet Trap is no mere technical exercise; Shyamalan gets other things right, psychologically, behaviorally. How time passes between the moment you enter a concert arena and the headliner actually takes the stage, that dead waiting-around feeling, is captured in a no-nonsense kind of way while the rest of the suspense is building. And the way Shyamalan looks at things is still a joy: a mysterious tracking shot toward a row of blood-red bathroom stalls (incongruous at first, but then we get it), or the director's scrupulous strategy of keeping Lady Raven in long shot during the concert, until the moment Cooper cleverly engineers a way for Riley to meet the star.
All very well and good, and maybe we expect the movie to end without leaving the hall. Then, the third act, and while still being delicate about spoilers, we can note here that Shyamalan violates the closed-room premise and opens up questions about audience expectations and storytelling traditions. He may be a classical filmmaker, but he upends his own rules and re-writes them on the spot. And yet most of the time, he plays fair; when you think he's allowing a character to do something stupid in order to achieve a plot point, it turns out something else is going on—your assumptions have to be re-written. (Maybe he doesn't nail it every time, I admit, and the final gotcha thing in this movie is pretty tired.)
Shyamalan quietly makes this film about the women, they way they hold the center, the way they anticipate action and assert dominance over a story that sounds like the same old masculine serial-killer crap. The women include not only Riley and Lady Raven but also the FBI chief (Hayley Mills—well, why not?) and Cooper's wife, played by Alison Pill in one of those savvy Shyamalan casting strokes. Plausibilists will be able to find the holes in Shyamalan's design, I am sure, but Trap is so much fun it justifies the occasional eye-roller. And by the way, all of this movie-movie appeal plays especially well in a big theater, which is where you should see it. You don't have to like serial-killer pictures, or teenybop music, to enjoy Trap; you just have to like movies.
August 23, 2024
