In Defense of "Trap"

M. Night Shyamalan's newest thriller is an elaborate illusion, not a failed venture into realism

This review contains spoilers. 

Since his run of critically acclaimed hits nearly 25 years ago, director M. Night Shyamalan been consistently categorized as a maker of dumb-but-fun cinema — great for a good time, but lacking the depth to hold up to serious critical scrutiny. The prevailing attitude is that Shymalan’s work is entertainment for its own sake, which can be enjoyed only when turn your brain off and forcefully disregard any critical consideration. 

But while Shyamalan’s work might be reduced to the class of pure entertainment, it is far from anti-intelligent. Since the release of Old three years ago, he has been operating with an acute awareness of his position within the cultural conversation and a naked transparency about his relationship to the medium. While his last film Knock at the Cabin turned inward to grapple with the restricting expectations created by a consistent directorial canon, Trap shifts its focus to dissect the mythos of the villain. 

At first glance, Trap seems to follow a fairly basic formula; a cat-and-mouse thriller through which tension is built by its claustrophobic single-location premise. A manhunt at a concert involving a daughter trying to escape the crowd into the spotlight, and a father desperately trying to retreat into the masses to evade an ever-watching eye. Despite its endless movement, Shyamalan’s expertise in blocking keeps the audience on course, preventing the narrative from devolving into a trite cycle of creating, then thwarting, danger. 

Shyamalan conducts his entire film as an act of sleight-of-hand — a single fluid motion, openly artificial but enthralling regardless. The gimmick might seem like a failed attempt at naturalism, but it is an intentional venture into the uncanny, exploring the terror of a character’s failed attempt to juggle conflicting lives. Beyond exploring the well-tread territory of a serial killer’s compartmentalization of identity, Trap shows us the terrifying paranoia of its collapse.

In capturing the disintegration of distinct personas, Shyamalan leans fully into the mythos of a killer, not relying on the guise of pseudoscience and exploring a specter rather than a specimen. Shyamalan’s magic act is in full effect, never feigning reality while always maintaining sincerity. His imagination of a killer is almost supernatural — an impossible construction of two separate lives, carefully orchestrated to never meet despite operating within the same body.

As Shyamalan explores this interior relationship, he constantly alters the power dynamics of each scene — who is commandeering the space and what simple sleight-of-hand reshapes the tension to trap another character. Shyamalan builds a balancing act of a thousand ever-changing boxes, collapsing and twisting them to the point where they barely seem to operate within reality.

Because the film is intentionally irrational and absurd, examining the credibility of Trap’s logic is a pointless exercise, for it is far more concerned with its relationships than its reason. It is a work of misdirection, using the spectacle of illusion to explore the irrationality of love and the versions of ourselves we create to protect those we care about from seeing the whole truth. While Trap sacrifices logic and continuity for the sake of unabashed theatrics, it never sacrifices earnestness, resulting in a thriller so simple yet so satisfying you cannot even be bothered to peek behind the curtain. 

Trap was released on August 2, 2024 and is currently showing in US theaters.