Trap

★★★★

“Trap” is M. Night Shayamalan’s best film in years before it even begins, purely on the outstanding premise it sells itself on. Josh Hartnett plays an endearingly dorky dad, Cooper, who accompanies his young daughter to a pop concert for her favourite artist. This time, the Shayamalan twist comes at the outset: Cooper has a double-life as the city’s most notorious serial killer, and the entire concert is an elaborate sting operation, a trap, to capture the murderer. If the concept of a tense cat-and-mouse thriller set at a stadium concert isn’t enough to sell you, I don’t know what is.

Then again, Shayamalan has been nothing if not divisive. Inconsistent as he may be, the auteur has consistently made his projects his way, and his trademark style isn’t for everyone. Fans of his work will probably be as enraptured with “Trap” as I was. Non-believers are unlikely to be swayed.

Balancing tension and humour as only he can, M. Night Shayamalan delivers one of the most purely entertaining cinematic experiences I have had this year. Cooper finds increasingly clever methods of weaselling out of the various obstacles in his path, while simultaneously being full-on girl-dad mode for his teen daughter. It’s hysterical, twisted fun. Some will struggle with the improbability of nearly everything that happens here, but it is substantially more enjoyable to just roll with it. The setting allows for so much imagination and creativity in staging a thriller, and Shayamalan, who has always predicated his films on a single interesting situation, explores all the narrative possibilities with glee.

From befriending a merch vendor named Jaime (a likeable Jonathan Langdon) to covertly gain intel on the operation, to impersonating an arena employee to bustle through a crowded SWAT meeting undetected, Cooper’s modes of evasion are a constant source of excitement and humour, and take full advantage of a concert arena location. Similarly, the ways he manages to uphold the awkward dad identity with his inquisitive daughter (Ariel Donoghue) as he surveys complex plans of escape are wonderfully entertaining. A moment when Cooper suggests to his daughter mid-song that they should jump down into a stage trapdoor that a singer just came out of because it “looks really cool!” feels like a guide to the film’s tone moving forward.

And yes, expectedly, Josh Hartnett is doing unbelievable work here. An unabashedly goofy, exaggerated performance, Hartnett mines all the inherent humour and tension from his character’s two halves, delivering a rounded, dimensioned performance that remains firmly intact as he swings wildly between coldly calculating and wholesomely ordinary. He is having the time of his life in this role, and that energy seeps through the screen. As the film shifts in its final third, however, so too does Hartnett change into something purely sociopathic and frightening.

Taking a sharp left turn at precisely the right moment, “Trap” avoids confinement by pushing its story in an unexpected direction, while maintaining its core premise to thrilling extents. Where before, Cooper was in the FBI’s web, now he finds himself in a trap of his own making. The two lives he has worked to keep separate aggressively collide in the film’s home-stretch, and Shayamalan manages to transpose the problem-solving hijinks of the concert venue into an entirely new narrative context. The film’s first two-thirds may be more focused and overtly fun, but “Trap” really comes into its own once the concert ends. Its final forty minutes is home to some of the film’s most effective storytelling.

But it is within the confines of the arena where Shayamalan and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom do their most impressive work. Visually, this is one of the best looking major releases this year, and is continually astounding in its technical prowess. The concert is only ever seen through Cooper’s eyes — we never get a vantage point different from where Cooper is positioned at a given time — and this intentionality is great at physically placing us into this space. Mukdeeprom is given the freedom to go creatively ballistic, and he does so at every provided opportunity. A particular shot panning across the stadium as Cooper’s eyes follow a sea of fans lighting up their cell-phone flashlights has been etched in my brain, as has a killer split-diopter shot and an impossible head-on mirror shot in a dressing room.

All of this is in service of delightful B-movie thrills. Because really, what M. Night aims for here is not nuanced explorations of psychopathic tendencies or examinations of the internal traumas that drive the seemingly ordinary towards extreme violence. “Trap” is flat and uncomplicated, and intentionally so. It’s quintessential multiplex entertainment, and feels intrinsically designed as a return to the kind of robust mid-budget thrills we see too few of these days.

If anything, “Trap” is a self-reflection on Shayamalan’s part. A macabre parable on work/life balance in which Josh Hartnett’s Cooper can be an excellent serial killer or fantastic family man, but not both at once. Being amazing at his work, being wholly consumed by it, makes him a worse father. Conceived initially as an opportunity for his singer-songwriter daughter Saleka Shayamalan to star in and produce original music for a major film, it is very telling that the central relationship of the film is between a father and daughter. Shayamalan, to some extent, interrogates his own value as a parent obsessed with his craft.

“Trap” is about a trap, an FBI sting operation at a pop concert, but it is also about the traps we inadvertently set for ourselves. The way that the lives and circumstances we construct for ourselves can be flipped against us. Cooper may find the stadium exits covered by police, but the M. Night Shayamalan twist is how the real trap is one of Cooper’s own construction: the love he has for his daughter, which keeps a panicked killer bound to standing amid screaming teens singing girlie pop.