For better and sometimes worse, no-one makes movies quite like M Night Shyamalan. Over a 30-year career, the American writer-director has delivered pop-culture hits (The Sixth Sense), fascinating oddities (Unbreakable, The Village) and a run of original genre pieces — from Split to Old — that stand apart in a Hollywood that's become ever more hom*ogenous.
It's true that not everything works, but like Joaquin Phoenix's alien slugger in Signs, he just keeps swinging away.
Shyamalan's latest is no exception. Pitched as "The Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert", Trap is an inventive, improbable and sometimes very funny little thriller, with enough tonal swerves to keep its audience hooked.
There is a certain playfulness — even relish — to the way the film puts its audience inside the mind of a killer.
The premise is a banger. Police and FBI agents have surrounded a stadium in downtown Philadelphia, where they believe a serial killer known as The Butcher is attending a sold-out concert by pop star Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan's daughter and real-life singer Saleka, who also performs the songs).
They don't have an exact make on their suspect, but they've narrowed it down to a handful of possibilities (the convoluted sting does get explained at some point, though it's best not to think about it too much). For one, they know it's a middle-aged guy. How hard could he be to identify and apprehend in a stadium full of 20,000 screaming teenagers?
It might even be Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a local firefighter who's at the show with his fangirling teenage daughter Riley (Australian actor Ariel Donoghue, giving a masterclass in "oh my gods!").
He's an affectionate, if slightly awkward, suburban dad: he cracks bad jokes, tries hopelessly to keep up with Riley's teen-speak, and makes sure she gets the T-shirt she wants at the merch stand. Oh, and he may have a victim locked up in an undisclosed basem*nt; a life he can terminate with the press of a button on his phone.
These aren't exactly spoilers. Within Trap's first few minutes (and indeed, during its trailer), we're led to believe that Cooper is very much the killer, a revelation that frees up Shyamalan to roam across unexpected terrain.
Because the movie adopts Cooper's perspective, at least for much of the first hour, we're perversely invested in his escape from authorities, in the deviousness of his design. Will he slip out through the trap door on the stage floor? Can he convince the tour manager that his daughter has a terminal illness, and hustle them out via a backstage meet-and-greet with the star?
As ever with Shyamalan, the dialogue and performances are pitched on a knife edge between the sincere and the ridiculous — no one ever seems to behave quite like real people, though we recognise his heightened, warped-mirror versions of reality.
Meanwhile, he and the great Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Challengers, Memoria) find imaginative ways to capture the stadium's familiar contours — there's a neat homage to Brian De Palma at one point. There's even stage a convincing pop concert in the process — not always an easy thing for a fiction film to pull off — you can tell Shyamalan has been to his share of all-ages shows with his daughters.
It all contributes to a distinct sense of unease that Shyamalan — at his best — does so well, scrambling tone and perspective to throw his audience off its bearings.
No small part of that is thanks to Hartnett, who proves to be an inspired choice for a cool dad who may be hiding a very dark secret. His performance here is deceptively complex, and often tonally brave — even as it runs the gamut from the awkward to the absurd, Hartnett never loses sense of his character's emotional reality, or his ability to generate empathy in the audience. It's an original.
Having the former millennial heart-throb menace young women — call him Trap Fontaine — is a clever play on his teen iconography. There's also something satisfying about seeing him square off against a teen star from an entirely different era, Hayley Mills, star of the 1961 The Parent Trap – ha! She plays the head of the FBI operation with an almost maternal instinct for her prey.
It wouldn't be fair to say too much more; suffice to say that Shyamalan has plenty of twists and turns in store in the movie's enjoyably silly back half — even if the twists aren't of the expected plot variety. Let's just say that you can trust Shyamalan to put more faith in Instagram Live than the police in a moment of extreme peril, and leave it at that.
Trap is screening in cinemas now.
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