Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap

By James Slaymaker.

Shyamalan’s careful misdirection reveals much about his protagonist, the society he lives in, and the capacity of cinematic form to perpetuate dominant cultural values.”

Spoilier Alert

In the final sequence of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap (2024), there’s a moment when Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), a serial murderer also known as “The Butcher,” is led out of the idyllic suburban tract house he shares with his wife, Rachel (Alison Pill), and two children, Riley (Ariel Donoghue) and Logan (Lochlan Miller), by a heavily armed SWAT team. Cooper has spent the entirety of the film devising increasingly ingenious ways to evade capture, but now, as he is led into a police car, it appears that he’s reached the end of the line. Seemingly resigned to his fate, Cooper asks if he can have a moment to himself. The SWAT team tentatively releases their grip on Cooper as he walks over to a child’s bike lying sideways on the lawn. He picks it up and caresses the handlebars with apparent tenderness. Shyamalan cuts to a close-up of Rachel, who is visibly moved by this gesture, and then to a wide shot of the SWAT team, who respectfully step back to allow Cooper to reflect on his relationship with his children. After a moment, Cooper stands up, gives Riley one final hug, and then enters the police van of his own accord. At first glance, Shyamalan seems to have chosen a sentimental note on which to end his otherwise delightfully sardonic thriller: the killer no longer chooses to run or fight, but finally accepts responsibility for his actions, and, with his last moment of freedom, laments the fact that his actions will surely mean he has forever severed ties with his kids. Shyamalan, however, soon undercuts this illusion of earnestness. As the van drives into the distance, the camera pans across the space of the yard and into a tight close-up of the bicycle’s front wheel to reveal that, while the members of the SWAT team let their guards down, Cooper was actually removing one of the metal spokes. Back inside the van, Cooper uses the spoke to discreetly unlock his handcuffs, and bursts into maniacal laughter, knowing that he has, once again, managed to slip out of a seemingly inescapable situation.

What’s brilliant about this closing sequence isn’t just the directorial sleight-of-hand, but also what Shyamalan’s careful misdirection reveals about his protagonist, the society he lives in, and the capacity of cinematic form to perpetuate dominant cultural values. Cooper has spent his entire life constructing an image of absolute normality, or at least what passes as normality in white middle-class America circa 2024. He has a respectable job as a firefighter, is an active member of the local community, and is the head of a picture-perfect nuclear family unit. His ability to avoid facing the consequences is dependent both on his position of privilege in society and his ability to perform the role of the concerned father. Cooper is thoroughly aware of the privileges he holds, and finding that those around him are naturally inclined to be sympathetic to him, he constantly emotionally manipulates others to achieve his own ends. When he performs a display of remorse, the (non-coincidentally, entirely white) SWAT team gives him the benefit of the doubt, and their lack of attentiveness allows him to secure the tool required to escape. But this is a simple ruse—self-preservation is always at the forefront of Cooper’s mind.

The plot of Trap is delightfully straightforward: Cooper is taking his daughter to the concert of internationally renowned pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan), in a large arena in central Philadelphia. The initial banter between Cooper and Riley is self-consciously generic: they riff on stadium food and modern slang, with Cooper leaning into the role of affable goofball, and Riley playfully rolling her eyes at his shtick. Shortly after the concert begins, Cooper goes to the bathroom to check on a live video feed, and it is revealed that he is keeping a young man chained up in the basement of a vacant house. Shortly afterwards, Cooper notices an alarming police presence in the venue, and presses a vendor (Jonathan Langdon) for information: the authorities have deduced that the Butcher will be attending the concert after finding a fragment of a receipt at the site where one of their victims was disposed of. The police do not know his identity, but their search is being informed by a number of details they picked up from unclear surveillance footage. The team is also being guided by an FBI profiler, Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills), who is an expert on serial killer psychology. The remainder of the movie shows Cooper working his way out of the troubles that issue from this invasive manhunt without arousing the suspicion of his daughter or the wider community.

Like much of Shyamalan’s work since Split (2016), Trap is a compact film, both spatially and temporally: the entire narrative takes place over the course of a day, and predominantly in a single location. It’s an experiment in how to repeatedly back a character into a corner and allow them to wriggle their way out. It pulls off the remarkable feat of sustaining an intense sense of tension from beginning to end, while also playing remarkable games with audience identification and empathy. For the vast majority of the film, after all, we are aligned with Cooper’s perspective and immersed in his heightened state of mind. We find ourselves searching the frame for surveillance cameras, looking out for escape routes, and scoping the visual environments for cops just as he does. Playing with perspective has always been an enduring element of Shyamalan’s cinema; he often allows the limited viewpoints of his central characters to circumscribe the information that is communicated to the viewer at any one point. Thus, the misdirections built into his narratives are reflective of what his characters choose to ignore and choose to pay attention to. In The Village (2004), for example, the characters have been socially conditioned from birth to be fearful of creatures of pure evil which wait for them beyond the confines of the titular hamlet, and it’s this intense paranoia that blinds them to the obvious cracks in the façade of the mendacious village elders. Similarly, in The Visit (2015), the central children are so desperate for emotional connection that they refuse to acknowledge the signs that the elderly couple posing as their grandparents aren’t actually who they purport to be.

If this reversal of dynamics means that Trap doesn’t quite pack the emotional punch of Shyamalan films like The Village, Knock at the Cabin (2023), and Old (2021), it features an invigorating formal playfulness and undercurrent of blistering social critique that renders it one of the filmmaker’s most accomplished works.”

Trap continues this aspect of Shyamalan’s work but inverts it in an intriguing way. Whereas Shyamalan’s protagonists are typically innocents whose eyes are gradually opened to the true nature of the world, here he foregrounds the villain. This creates a fascinating push-pull between our identification with Cooper as the focal character and our revulsion at his behavior; it is impossible not to be invested in his attempts at escape, even though we know that he is motivated by sociopathic cruelty. There is no external force threatening the protagonist’s safety to generate tension; the only thing to fear, on the contrary, is that the perpetrator of violence will face consequences for his crimes. When, early in the film, Cooper knocks an innocent woman down a flight of stairs to divert attention away from himself, we can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief—if Cooper is apprehended, there is nowhere for the film to go. If this reversal of dynamics means that Trap doesn’t quite pack the emotional punch of Shyamalan films like The Village, Knock at the Cabin (2023), and Old (2021), it features an invigorating formal playfulness and undercurrent of blistering social critique that renders it one of the filmmaker’s most accomplished works. It’s also easily Shyamalan’s funniest film to date, with a streak of off-kilter black comedy that arises from the ever-heightening absurdity of the situation and Cooper’s sheer tenacity.

The humor, however, doesn’t detract from the very real sense of anger the film radiates. Cooper is charismatic, intelligent, and resourceful. He has an exacting attention to detail and the ability to scope out a location within a few seconds. When a situation goes off the rails, he thinks on his feet and pulls off seemingly impossible feats. He’s also a megalomaniac whose immense sense of entitlement is fostered by the society around him. Cooper doesn’t just rely on his physical agility and intellect to get away with all he does; he knows that he can exploit his standing as a well-to-do, heteronormative, white patriarch to effortlessly maneuver through official spaces and pull the wool over the eyes of the authorities. At several points, Cooper adopts a new professional persona through a simple change of clothing and/or alteration of demeanor. He is able to effortlessly fit in with a crowd of police officers and security guards, simply because they think he looks the part and, therefore, don’t think to question his presence. The ease with which Cooper slips between personas and various restricted parts of the arena highlights the fragility of the hierarchies that govern such spaces: if you look the part and carry yourself with sufficient confidence, you can easily convince those in charge that you belong. Cooper also clearly views everybody around him as a means to an end, whether it’s manipulating the goodwill of a friendly vendor whose keycard he steals to gain access to restricted areas, or a service worker he horrifically injures as a distraction tactic. Cooper’s escape from the venue relies largely on his capacity to dupe others; he certainly uses brute force at times, but he predominantly relies on manipulation to convince others to become willing (if unwitting) participants in his acts. Cooper has never suffered consequences for his actions, and it is this feeling of invincibility that powers him through the narrative, spurring him to try out increasingly elaborate lies and hare-brained schemes with the full confidence that even if they backfire, he can somehow talk his way out of the situation.

There’s an extra-textual layer at play here, too. A prominent leading man in the late ’90s and ’00s who has, barring an impressive supporting turn in last year’s Oppenheimer (2023),been largely absent from screens over the past decade-plus, Hartnett’s presence alone is bound to conjure nostalgic memories for much of Trap’s target audience. Hartnett has the perfect combination of nondescript good looks, effortless affability, and on-screen emotional detachment to sell both Cooper’s sociopathy and the ease with which he’s able to blend into mainstream society. There is a certain flatness of affect to Hartnett as a screen performer, which, depending on the material, can either be a significant liability (Pearl Harbor (2001), Lucky Number Slevin (2006)), or a major asset (The Virgin Suicides (1999), The Black Dahlia (2006)). In Trap, this vacant quality is essential to Shyamalan’s presentation of Cooper. The stiffness of Hartnett’s presence underscores the flimsiness of his façade of normalcy, yet this very blankness allows others to project onto him. In other words, Cooper so perfectly embodies what the characters perceive to be the picture-perfect American dad that they willfully buy into Cooper’s performance because to question it would mean forcing themselves to question their own deeply ingrained values, ideals, and biases.

So masterful is Shyamalan’s handling of POV over the first two acts of Trap that the sudden switch in the third act has been described by many critics as something of a letdown. For my money, however, this section of the film adds multiple new layers of meaning and intrigue to the film, rendering it a significantly richer text than if Shyamalan had stuck with Cooper’s perspective from the first frame to the last. After the concert is over, Cooper, despite making his way backstage, discovers that every exit is being monitored by police officers who are recording intricate details of every attendee. Knowing that there’s no way he can get out of a door without forfeiting compromising information, he makes a last-ditch effort to preserve his freedom: he talks his way into Lady Raven’s dressing room and, once they are alone, reveals his true identity to her, threatening to murder the man he has captive in his basement via a remote control device accessible through his phone, unless she can get him out of the venue undetected. Shyamalan’s experimentation with perspective continues, but now it is tied to Lady Raven, a figure who has, thus far, barely registered as a character. Lady Raven agrees, offering Cooper and Riley a trip home in her private limo, but, in a manner reminiscent of Cooper earlier in the film, she is constantly looking out for potential exit routes. Again, the POV figure walks a tightrope between self-preservation and performing to social expectations, as she fears that if she lets her jovial star persona drop for even a second, an innocent life will be lost. When Lady Raven offers to pay a visit to the Adams home, it represents a bizarre mirror image of the concert. Whereas, before, Lady Raven was performing to a rapt crowd while Cooper obsessively looked for a means of escape, here Cooper is the center of attention, performing a simulacrum of suburban bliss within his own self-created stage, while Lady Raven is on edge, carefully watching every word and perceptually searching the environment.

The other aspect that makes this section of the film fascinating is that, in removing our perspective from Cooper’s POV, we can see him as he appears to his victims. We have experienced thrills from watching Cooper ingeniously evade detection, but how would it feel to be one of the concert attendees, knowing that they are in the presence of a murderer? How would this heighten their sense of paranoia, danger, and threat? From this outside perspective, Cooper is revealed as the monster that he is, a deranged control freak driven by self-loathing and pure rage, a brute willing to stoop to any low in the interest of domineering everybody and everything around him.

But the film’s most subversive gesture comes in that aforementioned final sequence. After pulling us out of Cooper’s gaze, after showing us the devastating effects his behavior has on those around him, Shyamalan returns us back to his perspective and provides us with a false narrative of redemption that Cooper neither earns nor desires. The film even tacks on some cliché psychobabble explaining away Cooper’s murderous impulse as being the product of deep-seated mommy issues. It’s the kind of simplistic device used in countless crime movies and shows to drum up some sympathy for serial killers and provide a false sense of depth, but here it’s another red herring. Framing Cooper’s psychopathy as merely the product of childhood trauma allows the characters (and, by extension, viewers) to divert their attention from the way that Cooper’s behavior has been enabled by a society that blithely rewards dominant notions of ‘normality’ and demonizes superficial notions of ‘otherness.’ And Cooper, again, plays the part, allowing himself to be pathologized so he can solicit pity, which he then manipulates to serve his own ends. No matter how often he proves to be untrustworthy, however, he is afforded endless chances. And so, we come back to the bicycle on the lawn and Cooper’s performance of a repentant father emotionally shattered by the collapse of the nuclear family unit. The SWAT team, Riley, Rachel, and even the FBI profiler are taken in by this ruse, so attractive are the enduring narratives that attempt to reinstate the illusory moral order of American society. By this point, whether or not the viewer is similarly drawn in reveals much about where their own sympathies lie.

James Slaymaker is a journalist and filmmaker. His articles have been published in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies, McSweeney’s, Kinoscope, Film Comment, and others. His first book Time is Luck: The Life and Cinema of Michael Mann (Telos Publishing). His films have been featured on Fandor, MUBI, and The Film Stage, as well as screening at the London DIY Film Festival, the Concrete Dream Film Festival, the InShort Film Festival and The Straight Jacket Film Festival. He is currently a doctoral student at The University of Southampton, where his research focuses on the late work of Jean-Luc Godard, post-cinema, and collective memory.