Forget your stupid Dad: M. Night Shyamalan’s superhuman escapism in Trap
The author is behind an analysis project about M. Night Shyamalan‘s films. There are several articles on each: The Sixth Sense (1999, here, here and here), Unbreakable (2000, here, here and here), Signs (2002, here, here, here and here), The Village (2004, here, here and here), Lady in the Water (2006, here and here), The Happening (2008, here, here and here), The Last Airbender (2010, here and here), After Earth (2013, here and here), Split (2016, here, here, here, and here), Glass (2019, here), Old (2021, here) and Knock at the Cabin (2023, here). All the articles can also be accessed through this overview.
The events of Trap will be freely discussed with no spoiler warnings. The ending of Knock at the Cabin will also be alluded to. For a summary of the plot see here.
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The conceit of Trap (2024) is that there is a man who has an almost superhuman ability to turn circumstances to his advantage. He is observant to a heightened degree, forever figuring out the angles. He automatically probes people’s weaknesses to potentially exploit them. He has an unerring ability to connect with other people, making them believe almost any lie and do things they otherwise would not. It is almost like a superpower.
The strategy behind M. Night Shyamalan‘s latest film is that a virtuoso performance by Josh Hartnett shall seduce us into accepting Trap as an arena of pure playfulness. The whole point is for us to delight in following the protagonist as he is navigating an enormous number of obstacles, with extreme audacity and a phenomenal ability to think on his feet. He is also very, very lucky but to a large extent his skills enable him to create his own luck.
Forget about realism. Fully embrace suspension of disbelief. If there is a film not for viewers of the type that Hitchcock, a major influence on Shyamalan, contemptuously called “The Plausibles”, it is Trap. It is literally luxuriating in its own implausibilities – not only that, it eventually becomes dreamlike in its unreality, where the superhumanly slippery hero has seemingly attained the ability to disappear and resurface at will.
The very tone of the film becomes unstable too, with a sudden shift into slow-burn, serious, dark psychological probings during the last fifteen minutes. Its plasticity also extends to the cast of characters, as Hartnett’s status as sole protagonist will be challenged, not once but twice. So what starts out as a straightforward story during the first act will eventually become as audacious, demanding and complex as most of the director’s other works – as if the capriciousness of the hero has crept into the fundamental structure of the film.
If you cannot join the thrill ride, if you are not seduced by Hartnett’s performance, or cannot appreciate the humour of the film – sometimes goofy, often very black – which is such an important tool in the process, there is of course a problem. Then you can sit and destroy it in so many ways, cataloguing the supposed ineptness of the FBI, complaining about the cumulative, enormous improbability of the whole thing. Just the idea that the authorities would mount what must have been an incredibly expensive operation to catch a killer in the manner the film describes is contrived right out of the gate.
Contradictions and complications
Trap is a film of contradictions. On the one hand, in Shyamalan’s work it is only rivalled by The Visit (2015) as a piece intended for pure entertainment – as if he needed a breather after the chaos of Old (2021) and the intense moral drama of Knock at the Cabin (2023). On the other, the nature of the hero in Trap is a bold departure: for long stretches of the film we are asked to identify with a protagonist that is a stone-cold psychopath and a serial killer. This is complicated, however, since the viewer has already connected with him due to his exterior as a genuinely doting father and the playful relationship with his daughter long before his monstrous side is revealed – in a way, Trap is not only about a trap for him but for the audience too, into rooting for a killer.
Shyamalan’s films have featured villains in central roles before: Both in Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016) they are as important as the hero/heroine, but Mr. Glass and Kevin Wendell Crumb – who re-emerge together in Glass (2019) – are not forces of evil nature like the Trap protagonist, who is a self-confessed “monster”. They are acting out of, to them, rational motivations, it is made very clear both have suffered tremendously, and as for Crumb, one of his main split personalities is an endearing nine-year-old. With his apparently high intelligence, knack for grasping opportunities, and all his contingency plans, Cooper Adams of Trap aka The Butcher is not unlike Mr. Glass. But while it is true that the latter has been behind mass killings, they are never directly shown to us, and in Glass he is almost portrayed like a hero. (The theme of brokenness – the hero of Trap believes everyone is “in pieces” – forms another link to these earlier films, and the tattoo on his forearm is reminiscent of the ones of the secret society in Glass.)
Shyamalan has made a smart move, however: the everyday alter ego of The Butcher in Trap is a somewhat goofy family man, and Hartnett is taking that playful aspect with him into the performance as the killer, creating a layer of often priceless black humour around his callous behaviour. This “double vision” of darkness and humour is nothing new for Shyamalan, and here it is as if the film is signalling that whatever terrible deed the hero does, we should not take it entirely seriously.
As for the unexpected turn into psychological gravity and gloom towards the end of Trap, we should keep in mind that even the joyful The Visit eventually featured some surprisingly dark characterisations of the old couple so central to the film, especially the female. And as for change of tone, the sudden darkness of Trap is not that different from the emergence of The Beast and his climactic encounter with the heroine in Split, but the otherwise light-hearted nature of Trap makes the change feel starker. The larger-than-life aspect of The Beast and his super-strength are also somewhat similar to the Trap hero’s increasingly “superhuman” abilities to escape (discussed here), and his stripped-to-the-waist appearance is copied in a key scene with Cooper, where he also shows apparent enormous strength fighting some FBI agents.
The fact that Cooper is a serial killer is already revealed in the two trailers. There was anxious chatter that Shyamalan somehow had let slip “the twist”, but it is not a twist, simply the basic premise for the story, which is announced as soon as fifteen minutes in. But like the last seconds of Split contained a kind of meta-twist – not something that forced us to re-evaluate most of what we had seen like a proper twist does, but re-evaluate the very positioning of Split within Shyamalan’s work – the Trap trailers led us to believe that the action would be confined to the arena of the pop concert. So when Cooper at story mid-point sails out of the arena in the singer’s limousine, never to return, in the context of plot it is merely a turning point, but in relation to the expectations raised by the trailers one can speak of a meta-twist.
Even for this writer, who shunned the trailers, it is a disorienting development, and the film is further complicated by the partial shift in point-of-view when two other characters, almost out of thin air, will rival Hartnett’s centrality as a protagonist. We should not be that surprised, however: from the point that Shyamalan’s career started in earnest with The Sixth Sense (1999), it is only Signs (2002) that comes close to have a single hero (but the other people at the farm are still very important) – in all the other films the limelight has been shared between two characters or sometimes an entire collective. And in The Village (2004) the character of Ivy completely took over the lead from Lucius after he got seriously wounded.
The budget of Trap is supposed to be considerably higher ($30M) than normal during the last decade of self-financed films from the director, and the result is a surprisingly lively movie bursting with activity – the anti-thesis of the director’s early, highly endurable mood pieces from 1999 to 2004. Trap springs a steady stream of narrative surprises on us, part of a trend in Shyamalan’s latest films, which are highly eventful with a plethora of turning points: Glass, Old and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Knock at the Cabin. The downside of this scriptwriting approach is that the first-time experience will be dominated by these surprises, so that the intensity or exhilaration of that experience might lessen the impact of revisits: however fine a film Knock at the Cabin is, this writer has never been able to replicate the intensity of the first meeting, and to a certain extent this has also been the case with Trap, even though it holds up very well.
Setting the stage
The hero’s first line is “we’re not gonna break any laws”, which is hilarious considering that Trap will be a marathon of relentless law-breaking. Resisting calls to break traffic rules to arrive in time, Cooper Adams is on his way to an afternoon concert with the immensely popular singer-songwriter Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) together with his 12-year-old daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue), who idolises the singer. Curiously, the opening scene sort of continues where the utterly different Knock at the Cabin left off, with a parent and his daughter in the front seat of a car listening to someone’s favourite music.
A lot of the tension of the first act comes from our asking ourselves: what is the exact nature of Cooper’s relationship with his daughter? Over the course of the story, we come to realise that this psychopath can feel genuine love towards his family. This sort-of-split-personality should not be too difficult to swallow for viewers familiar with Split – in fact, like with James McAvoy in the earlier film, this type of role appears to have unlocked something similar for Hartnett, who is making a sort of comeback here, with something totally different than his earlier heartthrob persona.
Riley seems to be Cooper’s favourite. Not only is she loved, she becomes virtually his only weakness throughout the film, something that is constantly exploited by others. Donoghue, an Australian actress – another link to the The Visit with its amazing duo of Ed Oxenbould and Olivia DeJonge – plays her very naturally, which appears to be a deliberate choice by Shyamalan to make Hartnett’s stylised performance seem even odder and more amusingly manufactured.
Cooper also suffers from visions of his mother, which eventually becomes his only other weakness, where Dr. Josephine Grant, a successful FBI profiler in charge of the operation against him, will have a pivotal role. She is played by the beloved veteran Hayley Mills, and her presence in the film creates several connections. Her age at 78 will link her to Cooper’s mother, as well as the fact that she is out to punish him like the mother did; our memory of her as a former, world-famous child star forms a much more subtle connection to Riley; and one of her most acclaimed films was called The Parent Trap (1961), which should make her ideally suited to a story about a trapped parent. Finally, she is reminiscent of Dr. Fletcher who dealt with a similarly fragmented villain in Split.
Some of the milder absurdity of Trap springs from the parental multitasking of ensuring that Riley is safe among the throng of concertgoers and on the other hand the ultra-urgent need to escape the FBI, who has Cooper trapped at the arena with an iron ring of armed personnel. The presence at the concert of the mother of another girl, with whom Riley has had a bitter falling out, presents another amusing distraction for Cooper, who must deal with her too. Played by Marnie McPhail, she is wild-eyed, rather ridiculous, and might have a thing for Cooper. In their next encounter she is more difficult to handle, however, thus foreshadowing two important female characters who initially appear docile but will stand up to Cooper.
Throughout the film, until the story ends some ten to twelve hours after the opening, the distraction pattern will only become stronger, Cooper stubbornly ploughing ahead with his ingenious plans despite constantly being obstructed.
The experience
In the early stages of Trap, Cooper becomes our stand-in as a bemused, alien observer of the rituals – a very Shyamalanian motif – at a typical concert for preteens and young teenagers, seen through neither condescending nor romantic eyes. After the concert has started, the stage performances become an anchor of normality as Cooper time and again returns to Riley in the arena, from his evil excursions as The Butcher looking for a way out of the trap. But it is a normality that is kind of treacherous, dominated as it is by enormous stage screens and otherworldly, elaborate dance numbers, while the enthusiasm of the girl audience radiates an innocence that forms a bittersweet contrast to Cooper’s doings.
This dissonance shall soon reach another, red-hot level: the girls are filming the concert on their phones, but the next time we see Cooper producing his own, this is inside a stall in a restroom in an overpowering red colour, and he looks down on it with a suddenly seedy, inscrutable face from a menacing vantage point, towering over a low-angle camera. We hear moaning from the phone – is this doting father, this patiently paternal figure, really some sort of sex addict who just cannot resist leaving his 12-year-old to look at grubby porn in the toilet?
Shyamalan expertly keeps us waiting for a while, until we are allowed to see what Cooper sees: a young man who appears to be held captive. After a ten-minute overture this is the first real chess move in the film, which is immediately followed by the move of his opponents: shots of SWAT team cars approaching at high speed. Our new feeling of bewildered estrangement is heightened, but subtly, with the next short scene, a highly ambiguous one where Cooper seems to have a vision of an old woman.
After about fifteen minutes there is a pivotal scene where a merchandise salesman named Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) tells Cooper what is going on, when asked in a studiously naïve way what’s up with all the cameras and the police. This author finds the scene uproariously funny: not only is Langdon terrific in his mix of bubbling self-importance and childlike enthusiasm about his inside knowledge, but Hartnett is so artificial and oddly off in his reactions. And not least, the scene is filmed with enormous close-ups with both actors looking directly into the camera – Hartnett is actually staring into it, often with a half-idiotic, stiff grin, and his eyebrows almost go through the roof when he asks the key question about the police presence.
The combination of two types of goofiness from the actors and this extremely heightened, almost obscene way of filming the situation is a knock-out. From Cooper’s dwindling grin at the end we understand that he is The Butcher, and every police officer and every arena employee are looking for him. The disaster of this news for him stands in darkly amusing contrast to Jamie’s gleeful telling, and part of the fun is that behind Cooper’s goofiness we can see a shocked Butcher continually processing what he is told.
(As great as Langdon is here, about the only thing in Trap that did not work at all for this writer was the brief “afterthought” scene that comes as a small joke early in the end credits, where his acting is banal and stereotypical, as Jamie watches the news, realising the guy he talked to was actually the murderer. It just feels like a big, primitive let-down after the fascinating, proper ending – although the sudden intrusion into the end title scroll, mirroring the “breaking news” on the TV, is an interesting idea in itself, which also maintains Trap as a source of an unending series of surprises.)
So this is a complete turnaround of what a viewer unfamiliar with the trailer could expect: a loving father having to protect his daughter with a disaster, perhaps a terrorist attack, taking place around them. Part of what makes Trap so entertaining is the fact that we can never know what comes next: is it pure callousness from The Butcher, is it his amusingly improvised problem-solving around the police, or the goofiness of Cooper the father? As his situation becomes increasingly fraught, he often speaks to Riley in a high-pitched, sing-song tone, suggesting they do strange things together, whose inappropriateness comes across as absurdly funny, for example exploring what is underneath a trap door in the floor from which a guest artist emerged to take part in the concert.
In-between there are genuinely shocking moments that gradually reveal how offhandedly evil and inhuman his Butcher persona actually is, like when he pushes a drunk woman down the stairs just to test out the reaction of the police, and as another diversion arranging an explosion at a snack bar which is likely to scar the face of another woman for life. Sometimes one gets the impression that he is not actually a human being but just pretending to be, with his odd pauses and somewhat-off facial expressions.
Trap also evokes a sad pathos in some moments where Cooper’s lines to Riley take on a special resonance, considering the arc of the story. “After this I won’t leave you,” he says after having to go away once more during the concert to attend to Butcher business, or “Forget your stupid Dad” after an especially outlandish suggestion for them to leave so he can look for an escape. Here his tone has a certain plaintive quality as if he is aware of what is bound to happen.
Towards the end of the first act the tour manager says to him: “your daughter will never forget today”. It is truly a fantastic gift he has given her, as a by-product of The Butcher’s escape plan: as the concert’s Dreamer Girl, dancing with her idol on stage, visiting her backstage – and even having the singer on a home visit! It is a dream day for her, but there will also be a nightmare. (This passionate review touches upon the tragedy and also offers an interesting addiction perspective on Cooper.)
Seeing the daughter of the hero and the daughter of the director joyfully interacting on stage, as well as Shyamalan himself playing the liaison that made this possible, invites pondering an autobiographical aspect of Trap. (More linkage: both Hartnett and Shyamalan are the father of three daughters.) The characters are intertwined right from the start, by voice, Riley starting to sing along with Lady Raven’s song just as the director’s name appears during the titles, and by body, with the pop star’s face on Riley’s T-shirt in the opening shot. Amusingly, she is a terrible singer. Cooper loves his daughter and Trap is also a love letter from Shyamalan to Saleka, whose birthday is 1 August, with just a couple of exceptions the earliest world-wide release date for the film.
Reading and playing others
Throughout the arena section of the film, Cooper is at various times hiding in plain sight, playing the fool, pretending to be jovial and naïve, for example in the amusing episode when he is waltzing in among the SWAT team that is getting a briefing about him, while he pretends to be an employee checking the coffee and helping them find the sugar. But, like so many times, this is improvisation. He has to do it or else some late-comers for the briefing arriving behind him might react to him if he tries to leave again that way. In this scene Hartnett plays him with a small smile: Cooper himself is amused, along with us, by the wackiness of the situation, and the film being aware of its own ridiculousness is a central part of its charm.
We learn quite early that Cooper is an ultra-fake psychopath, but almost everyone finds him very authentic and likeable. This enables him to connect with them, while scanning them for weaknesses, as if he is reading their thoughts to find buttons to press and make them do Cooper’s bidding, almost as if he is hypnotising them. Precisely this mesmerising aspect occurs most bluntly in his last encounter with the mother of the other girl, where he proposes a conflict-solving pizza date with their daughters. In a tight close-up he is first looking just past the lens and when she is still confused, Shyamalan has him looking directly into the camera, this device helping express to us his intense capability to overpower her into accepting.
Take the pivotal scene where the merchandise guy Jamie spills the beans on the whole FBI operation. This happens after he has been impressed by Cooper’s “values” when the latter has let the obnoxious girl beside them get the last T-shirt, acting like a perfect father with relaxed magnanimity, persuading Riley to accept the loss. We can see, however, something click into place in Cooper’s mind when he realises that Jamie is touched and thus a potential mark for manipulation.
In the following Cooper is so easygoing and uncomplicated, almost like a country bumpkin, that Jamie decides he cannot possibly be any threat. We don’t know it yet, but as it turns out, Jamie has his own reasons for being so talkative about the trap, in addition to being the type of person who wants attention. When Cooper returns to him later, the fact that Jamie hasn’t got the T-shirt for Riley as promised after all, his small embarrassment over this makes it easier for Cooper to persuade him to let the stranger join Jamie to fetch it – saying no suddenly seems overly unreasonable – so Cooper can get a look behind the scenes of the arena for an escape, as well as an opportunity to steal Jamie’s access card.
Down there, Cooper can hardly believe how easy it is to play Jamie – their connection is firm to such a degree that Jamie wants to please him so hard, and also impress Cooper further with his inside knowledge, that without further ado he gives away the password (“Hamilton”) that all employees have received. Jamie admires Cooper for good “family values”, but his own son has taken a picture of a murder victim’s dismembered body and Jamie himself is eager to show the grisly image off to others. While Hartnett plays the scene with perfect irony, it turns out Jamie is an avid follower of The Butcher’s killings. Cooper also here gets to easily lift a very heavy box, in nice foreshadowing of the ending, where he seems incredibly strong when struggling with FBI agents.
Like a chess player, Cooper is looking for accumulating small advantages that together will constitute a big one. The greatest case in point is the somewhat odd intermezzo behind the scene curtain where it is revealed, just in passing, that Lady Raven has asthma and uses an inhaler, and also that she seems very concerned when a crew member stumbles and falls. Cooper observes this. Not only does she come across as a warm, helpful person but given her own breathing problems, she is likely to be extra impressed by Cooper’s threat to strangle his trapped victim with carbon monoxide – especially after having been thrown off-balance when Cooper, out of thin air, launches into his strange speech about the effects of that gas.
When she gets the choice between “save him” and “catch me” Cooper applies additional psychological warfare, mockingly moving his head from side to side, with a studiously loathsome smile and tone. The threat of carbon monoxide could simply be a lie, but with the asthma she is especially liable to believe in it. Having a condition herself can also make her more susceptible to let him into her dressing room to begin with – Cooper has convinced everyone that Riley has had leukaemia, and he mentions her condition as a lever to get Lady Raven to be alone with him.
Sometimes Cooper just gets lucky – incredibly so. Up on the roof, when questioned by a SWAT guy, the apron he has stolen to pass himself off as an employee just happens to have an all-important identity card in a pocket. His brazenness is breathtaking: unencumbered by a conscience and sense of shame, the psychopath can lie with stunning facility about anything. For example, he pretends to be up there because he is so badly shaken by a colleague having been burned (she could become scarred) – but it is his own doing.
Lying about cancer is about the lowest you can go, but Cooper does it as the most natural thing. He pretends that Riley has just recovered from leukaemia to tug at the heartstrings of Lady Raven’s spotter – who luckily just happens to be nearby – to get her selected as the concert’s Dream Girl, allowing Cooper to get backstage, but only after having connecting with the spotter with manufactured authenticity. Just afterwards, he is lucky that a SWAT person lets him pass, just on the whispered words about Riley’s condition from the spotter, whose absolute, calm certainty convinces the other.
However, as he is now about to kill his 13th victim, his luck is dwindling. If Cooper is a supervillain, Riley is his Kryptonite. “Never let the two lives touch” is a principle he seems unable to violate, so when he sees Riley and the rest of his family outside the garage, he is rendered powerless in their presence, and Lady Raven, a prisoner in his car, can just open the door and leave.
Right at the start, he would hardly have entered the building when the ultra-observant killer is noticing a heightened police presence outside, but he cannot bear the thought of disappointing Riley. (Is it coincidence that the father of a 12-year-old has killed 12 people so far?) At the arena, he is constantly hampered by her presence and an inability to leave her there when dealing with the trap. And it is when Lady Raven notices how Riley loves Cooper, in a deep embrace in the limousine, that she understands how she might turn the tables on him, thereafter playing on being Riley’s idol to get access to Cooper’s house and to overstay her welcome there.
Parallel characters
Some of the criticism of Trap has been that not only is Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka, a budding pop artist, heavily promoted during extended concert footage where an album’s worth of self-composed songs are unveiled, but the supposed nepotism goes much further, as she is somehow “shoehorned” into the plot as well, with a dominant role in the second act, even though she has no acting credentials.
Yes, she is unpolished as an actress, and her character might be the flimsiest in all of Shyamalan’s work – but she is almost sensationally likeable, and her stunningly statuesque looks become the subject of a series of fascinating close-ups. She is also radiating an infectious sincerity, in productively stark contrast to the super-shifty Cooper. Her character has little depth, however, and is “all good”. On the other hand, that is why the serial killer becomes interested in her: she thinks she is “whole” but the psychopathic Cooper is convinced everyone is “in pieces” – the reason why The Butcher dismembers his victims, and also reflected in Cooper’s fragmented behaviour, with his quicksilver changes between various personas. In fact, as this review points out, she is “embodying the selflessness of which Cooper is incapable”.
As for Lady Raven being shoehorned into the action, the development after the concert is actually very sound, founded on a number of parallels. A major structural principle in Trap is the connection between the singer and the serial killer. She is the main event of the concert but he is also the main event, since the whole thing is a set-up to catch him. She is a performer telling the stories of her songs, but he is a performer too, taking on a lot of guises to try to wriggle out of the trap.
Both of them enter the other’s home turf, respectively the concert arena and Cooper’s home, both theatres for a hidden war among unaware bystanders. These locations also seem to be connected by colour: the floors of the hallways around the arena are reddish-brown, which is also the case for the floor at Cooper’s house. The latter is shown in a couple of wide shots as if to emphasise this, including an overhead shot after he has been overpowered at the end, which corresponds to an overhead shot of him at the arena.
At Cooper’s house, she also proves his equal in thinking on her feet, and her ingenuity wins his admiration – even as overwrought as he is after having been exposed as The Butcher to his family, he asks “how did you do that” when he discovers via the phone that she has managed to free his prisoner. (Cooper has a strong curiosity – he also wants to get to the bottom of the details of how his wife found out he is The Butcher, and is “amazed” when analysing his new feeling of anger towards her.) But while Cooper is using his psychological insights to ruthlessly exploit people, for her it is something very positive, an emotional intelligence; just see how understanding and relaxed she is when she is greeting and interacting with his starstruck family. Cooper’s phone is a lethal weapon but Lady Raven uses her own for good, mobilising an enormous amount of followers via social media, fame being her super power.
Furthermore, for Riley they are both mentor characters, an important Shyamalan motif; their vehicles are black (her limousine, his car); like Lady Raven is towering over everyone via the stage screens, Cooper is regularly seen towering over the audience around him; and like the pop star has fans, Cooper has one too: Jamie, the jovial merchandise salesman, is an eager follower of The Butcher’s exploits, and in a sort-of parallel to the audience recording the concert on their phones, Jamie has the image of a Butcher victim on his.
One of the film’s most subtle scenes arrives when Lady Raven plays one of her songs at the Cooper family house, “Where Did She Go“. At the concert she performed a very similar tune, “Release“, the only piano-based contemplative song there, after telling the audience the tale of her father who left when she was seven, an event that scarred her. To move on, she forced herself to forgive him, however, and she invites the audience to picture someone who has hurt them and if they feel they have succeeded in forgiving them, they are to turn on the lights on their phones.
Cooper seems full of disdain over this pop psychology – while the thousands points of light around him inspire cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom to make some of Trap‘s most beautiful shots – but the similarity of these songs might not be lost on Cooper, and consequently he looks torn, almost tortured. Like the singer lost her father, Riley is now in acute danger of losing her own if Cooper is revealed as the killer, so the fate of the family is hanging in the balance. It does not make things better that it is a song that Riley loves, and she is now singing along, supremely happy.
This father-daughter aspect could also have played an additional part in persuading Lady Raven to help Cooper escape in her limousine. The age difference makes it easily possible that the man towering over her in the dressing room could have been her father, as if the parent who once left her somehow has re-entered her life, dominating her, even being extremely unpleasant – all this is throwing her even more off-balance, pushing her to go along with his plan. She also says that she feels she has a special link with Riley, who is very firmly established as a daughter in the narrative, and this is even further positioning Lady Raven herself as one. So considering her own father problem, her decision to thwart Cooper’s plans takes on another dimension.
Remarkably, the only time in Trap she is shown in profile among her many close-ups is precisely the two shots where she fires the opening salvo in her fightback against Cooper, in the limousine asking to visit his home, so this major turning point gets a visual twist as well. (And, brilliantly, when Cooper’s wife enters the story as an important character near the end, she is immediately shown in profile too for an extended time, having already decided on her own showdown with The Butcher. As a small joke, she speaks here with Dr. Grant, the FBI profiler, but the composition possibly also indicates she is scrutinizing the wife, guessing her secret plan.)
Now at Cooper’s house, Lady Raven struggles to get the better of him, and as a visual representation of these opposing forces, two successive shots show Lady Raven and Cooper’s weapons: an image inside the piano of its hammers striking – the instrument is a weapon since it is used to buy time and set up a situation where she can trick him – and then Cooper’s phone, with which he ostensibly films the situation, but it is actually a reminder that he will murder his prisoner by remote control is she reveals him as The Butcher. (Ironically, he is recording her now but at the concert he was one of the very few not filming Lady Raven.)
The song at the concert, “Release”, also has interesting connections to the same type of song with a similar name, “Remain”, which was important in Old, there too a favourite song of the daughter of a family, about the same age as Riley. By the way, Lady Raven having lost her father, and having just told the audience about this, is the likely reason why the spotter presents himself to Cooper as “her uncle” but adds “her mother’s brother” – and not, in one of the lamer accusations against Trap, that Shyamalan is generally explaining so much in his movies that he has to explain what an uncle is.
As serious as the above might sound, the sequence at Cooper’s house is at the same time one of the funniest stretches of the film, due to the cat-and-mouse game between him and the intruding pop star, right under the noses of the unknowing family. Especially amusing are the surreptitious glances and expressions that Cooper sends her, which alternate between mocking, quizzical and impressed. The way she manages to seize his phone, exploiting the fact that he cannot be violent towards her before his family, is both absurd and suspenseful, and very fluidly staged.
It is also formally interesting: when she ensconces herself in the bathroom, Shyamalan plays on the confined space for several minutes, while we only hear the sounds of the increasingly desperate Cooper while she works her social media account to get someone to free the prisoner. When he finally manages to open the door she is filmed from behind, which forms a nice bookend to how she was shot in the same way in an extended shot upon entering the house. Another bookend, featuring some Shyamalan toilet humour: the prisoner is revealed to us in the arena’s restroom and set free in another one, at Cooper’s house.
The 3 motif and colours
In a moving moment, when Cooper has been exposed as The Butcher to his family now standing outside the garage, he gives a piece of advice, about utterly banal everyday issues, to each of his three shocked family members (he also has a son). There seems to be a motif of three in Trap. The film can be roughly divided into three sections (the arena, Lady Raven at Cooper’s house, Cooper and his wife speaking at night), and it has three main characters. Cooper has three visions of his mother. He will leave Riley thrice during the concert. There are three potential 13th victims: the prisoner Cooper already has, Lady Raven and then his wife. Lady Raven is often showed in triplicate on stage, via the three big screens behind her.
There are three shots where his face is cut in half by the right edge of the frame. This composition seems to signify his violent/murderous side: it occurs when he sees his mother standing beside the burn victim, when he sees Lady Raven behind the stage curtain (where he gets the urge to kill her, according to himself later) and after he has escaped from the limousine in town (presumably he has now realised that it was his wife who betrayed him to the authorities in the first place, and he intends to kill her instead, and then commit suicide).
On a more fine-grained level, there are three stalls shown in full in the shot of the arena restroom (see slide show further below) where he will check on his prisoner – an important moment: this is the film’s first indicator that he is not the upstanding family man he lets on – and three large posters of Lady Raven in the shot where he pushes the drunken girl down the stairs.
When Cooper is escaping the arena in the singer’s limousine, the framing dwells on a strongly foregrounded sign announcing “three phase signal” (and a traffic light with three lights). This is brilliant since in just a few seconds, the film’s gears will shift into its second phase, with Lady Raven’s startling fightback against The Butcher, and soon the traffic light will change away from red, reflecting his diminished stature since this colour is connected to him.
Red is significant on an overt level too, because this is a very important moment: at the start of the shot, the light changes to red, forcing the limousine to stop – otherwise Cooper intended to get out on the near corner – giving Lady Raven more time to think, and during the stop Riley’s enormous affection for Cooper will reveal her as a weapon to use against The Butcher.
Colours are important in Trap. The restroom pictured in the above slide show is in overwhelming red. Inside the arena just before, the dancers appearing in red and the audience bathed in a red light, both for the first time, are clearly foreshadowing this moment. Later, Cooper’s Butcher business at the arena is often signalled by red. The woman he pushes down the stairs wears a red jacket. The main purpose of an overhead shot of Cooper traversing the hallway seems to emphasise the reddish-brown floor, before he uses the stolen access card to explore an employees-only area. The snack bar explosion is less clearly marked, except some dashes and the dark red apron he steals.
The bicycle that becomes so important to Cooper at the end is pink/red. There are quite a few red objects at the playground – the location reflecting The Butcher’s playful nature – in the crime scene photo with the body parts. Amusingly, among the three rackets on the garage wall, it is the red one that falls down, at a point where things will really start to go wrong for Cooper. A tiny detail: the mouthpiece of Lady Raven’s inhaler is red, and her asthma will be subtly exploited by him. On top of everything, Cooper is covered in red on the official poster.
The only other colour that is washing over the concert spectators is blue, a colour generally associated with the police. Lady Raven, their close collaborator, arrives at the arena in blue. Cooper’s wife wears (lilac) blue throughout and she will be revealed to have informed on him. After Cooper’s prisoner has been freed he is wrapped in a blue blanket, and the two all-important clues to save him are a blue door and a lion statue that is later shown in a blue light from a police vehicle. When things are hanging in the balance, there is a close-up of the alternating blue and red lights on the top of a police car racing to Cooper’s home.
The area where Cooper is seated at the concert has red chairs, surrounded by fields of blue chairs on the sides. At the end, Cooper is captured, inside a prisoner van with blue interior, wearing a shirt that is predominantly blue but with some red in it, indicating the possibility of escape. In fact, the pattern on the shirt is remarkably similar to the blue dress of his mother, another authority figure.
The ending
When Cooper turns up at home and scares his wife Rachel (Alison Pill) – the camera closing in on her while her back is turned nicely signals his presence before he says a word, and just before, a kettle on the stove sports a reflection yielding an otherworldly, distorted picture of the room – he states that it has dawned upon him that the trap was not set at the arena but at home, since he has figured out that Rachel has discovered his dark side and betrayed him.
In fact, there is a new trap set for him, a double one. Following in Lady Raven’s footsteps, Rachel too shows surprising resourcefulness and takes it upon herself to finish off her husband, by dousing some pie with a strong sedative. This is the remains of the dish intended to celebrate Riley’s strong report card (the concert was another reward) and as usual, everything to do with Riley appears to damage Cooper’s sense of danger and judgement.
The other trap is set by the FBI, who it turns out have the house under surveillance and are able to intervene when Cooper seems able to fight off the sedation. Their trap appears to be independent of Rachel’s plan, because otherwise the dialogue between her and Dr. Grant, as the latter leaves earlier in the evening, would not make sense. It is not Shyamalan’s style to be dishonest with the audience, to create misleading dialogue simply to spring a surprise on us. Probably Dr. Grant has made sure to install some listening equipment – she will soon prove to be aware of what has been said inside – having guessed that Rachel’s odd excuse to not join her children at her sister’s is masking other intentions, and playing along.
In an astonishing coup de théâtre, suddenly Cooper hears his mother’s soothing voice and in his dazed state he embarks upon a conversation that feels entirely real to him, while seeing her as a far-away, ethereal figure framed by the main door to the house. During his earlier, brief visions of her, she has been silent. The first time she is standing beside him in the restroom – her presence even more eerily out of place since this is of course the men’s room – but he closes his eyes with a resigned expression, indicating such a vision is normal for him, and she is soon gone. The second time she stands beside the shaking burn victim lying on a stretcher, in an odd, slightly lopsided stance and as if in accusation, while in a nice Shyamalanian move, all the other bustling human activity around the victim has been stripped away. There is a progression, however: the second time she looks at him, and now she seems to speak. The fact that she says “I accept you” to Cooper is an echo of Lady Raven’s forgiveness session during the concert.
But in the current case it is, of course, simply Dr. Grant who pretends to be his mother – playing Cooper’s own game, while he in his enthralled, addled state seems to be entirely honest, as if a child, for perhaps the only time in the film. The act has been foreshadowed for us by Lady Raven’s attempt to overpower him in the car by talking sternly to him as if being his mother. The young woman is very unconvincing, however, and Cooper, in a great scene, laughs off the whole thing. This tactic could be part of the briefing to everyone involved in the arena trap if they should get into a fraught situation with the killer, or Lady Raven might have realised it herself, during the laugh-out-loud moment when Cooper jumps to his feet to cut her off after she has started to talk about The Butcher’s probably difficult relationship with his mother. (In Trap it is only hinted at, in a single line of dialogue, but is reminiscent of how Kevin Wendell Crumb of Split was terrorised as a child, the cause of his split personalities.)
In the first two, proper visions, does Cooper “see dead people”? Why is the mother so old when Cooper’s traumatic experiences with her seems to be from childhood? Perhaps she is still alive and this is how she looks now? Or if dead is he, for some reason, envisioning her as she might have been today? It could be to make the parallel clearer between her and the 78-year-old Hayley Mills, to make Dr. Grant into a more psychologically formidable opponent for Cooper, and also, of course, to impersonate the mother in this key scene. By the way, Mills is sporting Vertigo hair, like Kim Novak in that film famously had her hair in a spiralling French Twist.
Hartnett’s performance cannot be emphasised enough. His facial expressions are performed throughout with sharp, flawless precision. When he reveals himself as The Butcher in Lady Raven’s dressing room he is like a mischievous boy delighting in letting her in on a secret, one that he is extraordinarily proud of, at the same time as he looks almost drunk with excitement over this bold move, which his entire existence will now hinge on.
After he has been exposed as a killer to his family, most of the goofiness is gone also from his murderer persona. In the great scene in the car with Lady Raven, he is delivering smirks and sly grins with great exactitude but there is now a prominent sense of tragedy: he looks painfully fragmented, world-weary and resigned to his fate of soon committing suicide. Hartnett is able to put a world of painful experience into simple lines like “I used to be punished a lot” as well as his “yes, they are” in answer to Lady Raven imploring him that “monsters aren’t real”, and then terminating the conversation with a half-mocking, deep-voiced “Mom”. His nocturnal talk with Rachel is similarly marked by a clear-eyed, calm nihilism and a remarkable range of emotions.
And just look at the way he is pacing back and forth in front of the open bathroom door to calm himself after the disastrous turn of events, or else one feels he would just have slaughtered Lady Raven on the spot. His moving “I thought I was pretending” to Dr. Grant-as-the-mother is ambiguous: is he talking about childhood, or has he been pretending so much in life that he is not sure that his professed anger towards his wife, a statement that seemed very sincere, might not have been real after all?
Hartnett’s greatness is supported by Shyamalan precision work. The chamber piece atmosphere of the final section is flawlessly maintained. “I’ll eat this in five bites,” Hartnett says about the pie that is to be a last meal, and he is seen or heard to do exactly five pieces. There is continuity consistency: the bicycle which will be important in the middle of the night is already present in the same spot as Lady Raven’s limousine arrives in the afternoon, already upended.
The closing minutes of Trap are fascinating, centred around a brilliant, Hitchcockian camera movement. After a moving embrace from Riley – especially since her current profound grief stands in contrast to her euphorically happy embraces with him before and after going on stage as the Dreamer Girl – Cooper is locked inside the prisoner transport van (conveniently, without any FBI agents sitting directly with him). It drives off, the camera moves away from the road, and we expect the film now to end, perhaps with the camera gazing at the house, with its doors now meaningfully closed to him – but in an increasingly surreal way it just keeps going, until coming to rest on the banal item of a children’s bicycle. As it keeps looking at the front wheel, however, we realise that one of its spokes is missing.
Cooper has tricked everyone (including the audience) when they thought it was merely his OCD that made him stop at the cycle just before to put it upright – we have seen this condition increasingly with him in the later stages, for example adjusting the towels in the bathroom even during the highly fraught situation when he ushered Lady Raven out of it, and taking the time to tidy up the house before escaping from the SWAT team – and when he stroked the seat of the bike we took it to be a regretful, resonant moment. But it was all misdirection, for the magic trick of taking the spoke under cover of the dark.
In the van he produces it from under his shirt sleeve and easily picks the lock of the handcuffs. It is like child’s play and indeed, his demeanour is now that of a naughty boy who once more has tricked the adults. The last seconds of Trap see him straighten his hair, restoring his characteristic, very Hartnettian middle parting, with his now free hands, the action connecting back to the shot just before the camera movement, when he was reduced to blowing his forelock away with his breath.
But there is also something really odd about this: he grins more exaggeratedly than ever before, takes a peek into the camera, and laughs in an almost crazy way, in an overwrought, very tight close-up, while a fairground-like music starts up, a musical tone alien to the film so far.
The scene is ambiguous, but is there a possibility that it is not real? That his mind has snapped and he is just imagining himself overcoming yet another impossible trap, just soldiering on? And the puerile behaviour indicates that he has regressed into a child as a consequence of the last encounter with his “mother”?
Whichever way, the ending of Trap is great. It could stop here, in madness, or it could be real, which would open the door to more stories about this charismatic murderer. Perhaps it is, like Glass turned out to be, an origin story?
Enclosure: The superhuman feats
Here we are going to briefly look at some situations that have made some claim that Cooper might have a sort of superpower, and even that the film will eventually turn out to belong to the same universe as Unbreakable, Split and Glass. There is a pattern here too, because we never see any (full) details about how he is performing these feats. (Apart from these situations, he is at times so incredibly lucky that one might speculate that he could have the power to manipulate reality to a certain extent.)
The snack bar explosion: how can Cooper manage to sneak in, turn the boiler to max and put the soon-to-explode bottles in the water, without being seen since there are so many people and employees present? There is a camera movement along the snack bar behind the counter that indicates that the employees near the boiler either are leaving or have their back turned, and how another employee is using a door that Cooper notes will lead into the kitchen. So if he is very fast, he might be able to go in without anyone noticing, with his normal audacity. There is a shot where we see a hand turning the dial to max but at that point there seems to be no bottles yet in the water, unless they are lying with the labels down. Or did he put them in afterwards without it being shown? His actions here look too fantastic but it might be possible. But there is also the question of surveillance cameras which are likely to be checked after such an explosion. The boiler is behind a corner, however, but the door he used ought to be more accessible for cameras. (By the way, we see Cooper and Riley eat there earlier so he is familiar with the place.)
There is another subtle device here that suggests an uncanny feeling that Cooper is sort of conjuring up the incident. Cooper is carefully placed in exact mid-frame while looking towards the snack bar, and after a cut the soon-to-be victim is placed in mid-frame too, as she is walking away. Cooper is also frontally placed to the camera and almost looking into it, with an inscrutable expression. His odd positioning and ditto sight line, as well as the way the lady almost springs from his mind via the cut – as if he already knows she will be the victim – somehow indicate that he may have the ability to shape the near future, or hypnotising the world, to his advantage, since we also see that other people near the boiler walk away or have their back turned.
This could also account for his fantastic luck and the ability to bend others to his will in other situations. Remember that David Dunn of Unbreakable had superpowers for years without knowing it and that Cooper is broken and fragmented, a fertile ground for developing special powers in Split. It would be nice twist, and of an innovative kind, if Shyamalan were to make another film that forced us to re-evaluate what we earlier saw in Trap as not the whole story.
Escaping his house through the tunnel: here it seems an awful short time for him to overpower the SWAT guy, take his gear and sneak out to the limousine, since the rest of team keep the house under close surveillance and it sounds like it is not long since he was last observed.
Escaping the limousine: it is halted in the city by people surrounding it before and after Lady Raven has escaped from the vehicle. (There is a festival going on so Cooper has not foolishly taken a route through a usually crowded area.) Here he notices some merchandise in the front seat that will allow him to switch from his SWAT gear. Later, he is seen, far away, among the crowd outside. I guess he would have time to put on the T-shirt and hat, but how did he get out of the car with everyone around? The police seem to arrive very soon, but here we must assume there has been a gap in time since they were called as soon as Lady Raven appeared and they need time to reach the place. The question of how he avoided detection by those bystanders remains, however, since they seemed to have surrounded the vehicle with the express purpose of stopping the vehicle and anyone from coming out. (It is still a bit unclear, however, whether they have actually understood that Lady Raven is in danger, or are simply milling around the vehicle to get a glimpse of the great star.)
The likely solution is that he has already started to switch clothing while Lady Raven is still struggling with the handcuffs and the bar they were attached to. Then when she gets out and the people on that side of the limousine rush towards the celebrity, amidst the confusion but unseen by us, he is getting out on the same side, behind everybody. At this point in Trap Shyamalan has become intent on springing surprises on us – or make Cooper seem almost superhuman – but the scene seems ill judged since this particular disappearance number has become a major stumbling block for many.
By the way, the scene is already on some shaky ground because there is a grave continuity problem (unusual for the meticulous Shyamalan): the area with the parasols on the pavement side of the limousine is dark in the overview shots of the street but bright as we see the police start to take action on the street level.
Earlier, when Cooper stops the limousine to handcuff Lady Raven, there is a nice turnaround, however: when he sits down briefly, they have exactly switched places compared to the escape from the arena.
Appearing at the house again: it turns out later that the FBI has the house under close surveillance. How did he manage to get in? Is there another tunnel? But probably the FBI simply let him in to trap him, afraid that he would not come if he perceived it to be guarded. By the way, this is likely to be several hours after he escaped earlier, since before he appears, his wife is watching a news report about the incident, featuring security camera footage of the kidnapping of his planned 13th victim, and time is needed to both find the tape and put the report together. A nice touch is that she is watching the news report with the sound off, contributing to the quietude of the whole sequence. (Or is the security cam footage simply silent, without any voice-over from a reporter?)
The very fast movement: but that footage raises another issue, since the victim seems to be pulled into Cooper’s vehicle at an inhuman speed. Judging from the time stamp of the footage, however, there are sometimes glitches that create small gaps, including at this point, so it is not inhuman after all, merely sped up. (But another indicator of way-above-average ability is the fact Cooper seems to be incredibly strong when he fights the SWAT people at the end, even when sedated.)
Just a thing about surveillance cameras at the arena: when Cooper steals Jamie’s access card and later a police radio, those events happen in employees-only places behind the scenes, where there appears to be no cameras. So criticising the FBI for not discovering those actions is not valid.
Finally, if Lady Raven had not interfered, what was actually Cooper’s plan after he and Riley had exited her limousine? He has escaped the FBI and the stadium but she still knows he is The Butcher and his full name. Could he really have counted on her being so terrified for the prisoner’s well-being that she would have kept silent about his secret forever? Even if he should somehow manage to kill her, many in the management have met him when backstage, and also observed that he drove away with Lady Raven. So his cover seems to be permanently blown and his family lost to him. Anyway, the limousine escape was an absolute last resort, so his relaxed attitude in the vehicle is probably one of his many masks.
