Trap was written and directed by the aforementioned M. Night Shyamalan (Glass 2019) and stars Josh Hartnett (Oppenheimer 2023), Ariel Donoghue (Blueback 2022), and Saleka Shyamalan (in her acting debut). The plot sees a father taking his daughter to her favorite artist’s concert, but his double-life and torrid secrets lead him into a game of cat-and-mouse with fatal consequences.
The setting of Trap immediately feels simultaneously intimate and larger than life. They use a giant concert venue with a massive audience, which gives the film a lot of different places and people to play off of. As the police close in on Hartnett’s character, both sides have to manipulate their space to stay one move ahead of each other. Hartnett creates a fascinating juxtaposition between the average doting father and the cunning lethal mastermind. While all of this is going on, Lady Raven (M. Night’s daughter Saleka) plays an actual concert with her actual music, and both her singing and acting were a phenomenal surprise.
The biggest detractors of Trap will say that most of the mental chess moves are implausible, and they’d be right. A lot of this film requires a substantial amount of suspension of disbelief, but it’s easy enough to get lost in the ride that you may not worry about the steps toward the destination. Hartnett and Donoghue’s father-daughter dynamic is heartwarming and real, and Lady Raven fits right in as the catchy pop maven.
Again, Trap won’t be the world’s most accurate movie. If you’re the type of fan who’s eager for every dot to connect, you may find yourself rolling your eyes. But Trap takes a unique venue and some very intriguing characters and fills the air between them with tension. As of this writing, you can stream Trap on Netflix, Max, or Hulu.
