Trap

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Generally speaking, whenever I go to see an M. Night Shyamalan movie, I spend the first 90 minutes admiring his skill as a director, and the last 30 minutes sighing bitterly about his skills as a writer. He’s always been an astute and inventive director of suspense, but his talents too often work in service of scripts that are embarrassingly jejune and insipid at the conceptual level.

Over the weekend, I read so many takes on his new movie, Trap, that were less about what the movie is and more about the reviewers’ complicated relationship with the writer-director, that my curiosity finally got the better of me. I bit the bullet, lowered my expectations to student-film levels, and braced myself for the worst.

Surprise! Trap is actually quite brilliant.

You may have heard that the plot is ridiculous, that the dialogue is tin, that the characters don’t behave like normal human beings, that the performances range from quite good to found-object. All of those things are true. In spades. With bells on. But it turns out that none of that matters.

David Mamet, in the decades before he lost his mind, wrote a number of excellent essays on the craft of writing. In one of them, he mentioned that the only question a viewer should be asking during a movie is “What happens next?” All the absurd coincidences, staggeringly implausible setups and on-the-nose dialogue in Trap exist for one purpose: to deliver 107 minutes of high-flown, nail-biting suspense. And, because he’s such a superlative director of suspense, the viewer goes along with all the silliness because it keeps the suspense going. In short, Trap is a suspense-delivery machine that never lets up for its entire run-time, something I’ve never seen before. Even masterpieces like Psycho or Body Double give the viewer moments of rest, but I’ve never seen anyone do what Shyamalan does here. Every time you think “Oh, he’s going to do this, but then that will happen,” he introduces a new wrinkle, a new wild idea, a new character, creating almost two solid hours of “What happens next?”

On top of that, the script is, surprisingly, about character. Essentially, it’s about a man who wants to create a memorable day for his teenage daughter by taking her to a concert by her favorite act. His daughter’s happiness is very important to him, and, throughout the first two acts of the movie, he has to balance his love for his daughter with his paranoia about being captured by the police who are after him. In the third act, the action shrinks down to a domestic level, with the daughter fading into the background as the pop star takes a central role. That might seem lopsided, but then Bettelheim teaches us that there are always fewer characters in a story than we think there are. On a conceptual level, the pop star is the woman the daughter wants to grow up to be, so the script addresses both the father’s present with his daughter and also their future. That is, the daughter is the girl who doesn’t know who her father is, but the pop star is the woman the girl grows up to be, the woman who now knows who her father is. The fact that Shyamalan has cast his own daughter as the pop star only underlines the concept.

I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil anything about this deliriously bonkers movie. Suffice to say, if this movie had been directed by Brian De Palma, it would be hailed as an astonishing return to form.