Trap spends its opening act doing something M. Night Shyamalan movies rarely bother with anymore: pure, gleeful high-concept mechanics. Cooper is a mild-mannered dad taking his daughter to see her favorite pop star, and within the first twenty minutes he's noticed too many police, too many exits blocked, too many undercover officers pretending badly to be event staff. Shyamalan lets us in on the joke immediately — Cooper is the serial killer the entire operation exists to catch — and then spends the rest of the film watching him improvise his way out of a stadium closing around him like a trap door. It's a thin premise stretched to feature length, and it mostly works because the stretching itself is the entertainment.
Josh Hartnett is doing the most interesting work of his career here, toggling between doting-dad warmth and controlled predatory calculation without tipping his hand too early, and the film gets real mileage out of how much fun he's clearly having. Saleka Shyamalan, the director's real-life daughter, plays the pop star Lady Raven in what amounts to an extended concert film wrapped around the thriller, performing original songs she wrote herself, and her scenes have an odd, sincere energy that keeps the film from feeling purely cynical. The back half loses some of its nerve, trading the claustrophobic stadium setup for a series of increasingly convenient plot mechanics that ask you to stop counting coincidences.
Josh Hartnett spends an entire pop concert one wrong move away from getting caught, and Trap turns that dread into pure, silly fun.
Trap works best as a pure exercise in dramatic irony — we know what Cooper is doing behind every warm smile, and the fun is watching everyone around him miss it — and Shyamalan clearly relishes putting his camera right up against Hartnett's face to let us watch the calculations happen. It's a sillier, pulpier movie than the director's prestige-horror reputation suggests, closer to a B-movie thriller dressed up with A-list production value, and it's more purely enjoyable for embracing that. The plot logic falls apart the moment you start poking at it afterward, but for two hours of concert-set cat-and-mouse, it's a good time.
Trap was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan through his own production company, Blinding Edge Pictures, and distributed theatrically by Warner Bros. Pictures on a reported $30 million budget. The film gave a starring role to Saleka Shyamalan, the director's daughter and a working recording artist, who wrote fourteen original songs to be performed as the fictional pop star Lady Raven — effectively building a full concert into the movie's midsection. Shyamalan has said the character was partly shaped by observing the scale and devotion of modern pop fandoms, with Saleka citing Taylor Swift's cultural footprint as a reference point.
Trap opened to a mixed critical reception, split between praise for its high-concept premise and criticism of its increasingly implausible third act, though it found more favor with audiences than with critics overall. It grossed over $83 million worldwide against its $30 million budget, a solid if unspectacular result for a Shyamalan original. The film added to the director's post-2015 run of commercially successful mid-budget thrillers following Split, Glass, and Knock at the Cabin, cementing his niche of star-driven, twist-adjacent genre filmmaking outside the traditional studio horror pipeline.
