The surface layer isn’t just innocent; it’s downright wholesome. With a day off from his gig as a Philadelphia firefighter, Cooper Abbott (Josh Hartnett), the world’s most statuesque cornball, has volunteered to escort his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a high-profile, stadium-set concert. The apple of her eye is Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), a Rihanna/Arianna Grande adjecent superstar whose songs are lascivious enough to warrant the comparison, though the sensual edge of the situation is fully sanded down by an endless stream of dad jokes and earnest, familial heart-to-hearts. Trap does away with the virtuous veneer of their situation in the movie’s early goings, but it’s worth taking stock of the basic bait-and-switch taking place in front of the camera, because it perfectly and hilariously inverts what’s happening on the other side of the lens. Writer/Director M. Night Shyamalan’s name might still foretell thrills, frights, and twists, but the auteur is firmly entrenched in his paternal phase, for better and for worse, often at the same time.

Carrying water for Shyamalan has become a cottage industry for film fans over the last decade, just as decrying his schticky structures and lead-footed dialogue was in the preceding years. Long gone are the halcyon days of The Sixth Sense and Signs, where locating the ceiling on a career that garnered comparisons to a young Steven Spielberg felt impossible. Perhaps the single most known quantity in all of modern filmmaking, each new Shyamalan effort promises high concept plotting, inhuman performances, and a third act reveal that’s more likely to prompt audible groans than involuntary gasps, all made at a low price point. Upon mercifully putting all Spielbergian aspirations to rest, the discourse has shifted to a more snugly-fitting Hitchcock correlation, and while juxtaposing anyone against the master of suspense is a doomed proposition, their twined existence as day players with an eye on titillation is far more apt, and their similarities don’t stop there.

Like the Psycho mastermind, Shyamalan prefers to keep things tight, relaying stories with limited settings and truncated runtimes, his camera up close and confrontational with his actors. Carrying the torch for Jonathan Demme’s direct address aesthetic, the faces in Trap are often large enough to occupy the entire screen, portraying emotions and inner conflicts that sprawl out fill the space. Accusations of overacting aren’t so much warranted as overtly courted, and those preferring the subtlety of realism are as likely to be agitated by the director’s latest as any of his previous outings. It will be their loss, because some of Trap’s logistical flights of fancy simply must be seen to be believed.

At the risk of spoiling a twist that occurs midway through your seventh bite of popcorn, Cooper isn’t exactly father of the year. The titular snare has been prepared for his capture, but the notion of putting thousands of innocent girl pop fans in harm’s way is somehow credible when compared to the movie’s other narrative machinations. Plot holes are usually the product of an arc that mostly holds together, requiring a few facts to be fudged along the way to keep the wheels spinning. Investing in Trap involves a suspension of disbelief that’s likely to turn faces red with effort, a slice of Swiss that’s more absence than dairy product, though the gleeful elision of common sense is so overwhelming that morphs into one of the film’s greatest attributes. Rather than keeping tabs on the flick’s constant violations of plausibility, the viewer is forced to accept its hairbrained worldview wholesale or be left in the dust, a trick that siphons a bit of tension from the proceedings but bolsters its involving nature. It also brazenly courts the so-bad-it’s-good labeling that attaches itself to anything as unabashedly ridiculous as this one, but the craft on hand would beg to differ.

Shot by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a previous collaborator with world cinema luminaries like Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Trap’s dimly lit hallways, sweat-inducing close ups, and split focus interactions are both exacting and propulsive, as is Noëmi Preiswerk’s breakneck editing. The movie never lets up, its technical aplomb placing you squarely in Cooper’s headspace, though Hartnett hardly needed the help. The former matinee idol is a revelation, twisting his smile from cloying openness into leering danger with enough electrical undercurrent to power a city. It’s far too broad of a performance to ever prompt an Oscar nomination, more geared toward fourth wall busting fun than genuine terror, but it’s hard to think of a 2024 movie that asked more of its lead performer, and received something so deftly calibrated to its gaudy and delicious aims. He even nails the dialogue, which, anyone from Mark Wahlberg to Bryce Dallas Howard will tell you, is no easy task.

Reveling in Shyamalan’s curiously alien word choices is perhaps the last level of movie addiction, wherein anything that strikes the pallet as unique is worthy of celebration. Often deployed in service of equally inhuman decision making and rudimentary interactions, the autuer’s preference for wooden, stilted dialogue is too consistent to be an accident. There’s no mistaking his pen for anyone else’s, its bumpy delivery as likely to delight as it is to annoy. The plodding banter could be seen as paying homage to the aforementioned Hitchcock pot boilers, whose chunky conversations are now viewed as lovable remnants of a time gone by. Here’s hoping that, 60 years from now, we don’t similarly dismiss Shyamalan’s screenwriting as a product of its time; it’s incredibly strange in the here and now, just like the rest of the director’s affectations. 

Most of these ‘grace notes’ are holdovers from the rest of Shyamalan’s filmography, and though the same can be said of Trap’s warped interest in the nuclear family, the washed parent era of his career is quite the development. As proudly reported during the opening credits, all of Lady Raven’s music is written, produced, and performed by Saleka Shyamalan, and if arranging an entire feature around your daughter’s fledgling musical career isn’t the final, most garish level of nepotism, it’s hard to imagine what is. Throwing industry weight around to give your family a leg-up isn’t the same as being out of touch, but unfurling fold-out chairs to line the floor of the stadium’s general admission section sure is, not to mention the concert’s frequent intermissions, and the idea of a matinee performance from a top line act. Our guy is simply not up with the times, but the same is true of his protagonist, and watching Shyamalan find empathy with his dastardly leading man, just a pair of bumbling fathers who wouldn’t know cool if it smacked them in the face, is a cringy delight. If this sounds like too many metatextual hoops to jump through, then it probably is. Trap won’t be for everyone, but neither are dad jokes, and both still have their champions.