Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024)

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

There's a moment in Trap, M. Night Shyamalan's latest folly (a word I employ with affection), that is as much a product of its time as Psycho was to 1960. Unable to tame the digital wilds of ebooks and screeners containing spoilers, Hitchcock could never hope to preserve the shock of the shower scene in 2024. But today, when mass communication and interpersonal communication are merging ever closer, Shyamalan bends our constant presence online (and the amped ubiquity of celebrity culture) to his suspenseful needs. In a pivotal scene, pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) jumps on TikTok Live to inform her millions of followers that there is a man being held captive. She knows only a few clues but once she provides those to her fans, they respond instantly and manage to locate and rescue the prisoner. Here Shyamalan uses the implausibility of the slasher genre to his advantage. You may feel it's unrealistic that a pop star could have immediate access to her fans. But that absolutely tracks with modern celebrity culture and the instant nature of digital life. It's equal parts preposterous and utterly believable, one of Shyamalan's many great attributes as a director. 

What's harder to swallow are the machinations of the serial killer Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett, a perfect role for his post-pretty boy victory lap). As with Jason, Michael, and Freddy, the man displays inhuman feats of strength and stealth. And when implausibility shades into confusion, I bristle. For instance, in the third act, how the hell does he manage to get out of the limo surrounded by Lady Raven's revenge-stoked fans? Because he put on a t-shirt he found on the passenger seat? Huh? 

Still, Trap is truly a folly because it's less a slasher film than a shameless vanity project for his daughter Saleka who stars as Lady Raven and gets to perform a full album's worth of her self-penned songs at a concert that comprises most of the first half of the film. There's even an accompanying album you can enjoy in all its meta glory. The songs are standard-issue bland pop, kind of like Ray of Light as an aesthetic strategy 30 years après la lettre. But the matter of the quality of the songs evaporates as Lady Raven takes an active role in the narrative and evinces a charity that would shame Mother Teresa let alone Lady Gaga. Where Cooper is Pure Evil, Lady Raven is Blinding Goodness as the film starts to take on Sextette proportions of delusions of grandeur. As an eternal lover of Sextette (the first half, at least), I must bow to both Shyamalans' shamelessness. And the fact that the people I saw it with had such passionately divergent reactions (the Mr. loved it, my two nieces and sister loathed it) makes me weak, hence the suitably preposterous grade below.

Grade: A-minus