Serial-killer films have more range than people realize. The sub-genre supports auteur masterpieces such as Silence of the Lambs and Zodiac, as well as low-budget productions like The Town That Dreaded Sundown and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer — the grainy realism often enhancing their impact. With Manhunter, Michael Mann demonstrated that even highly stylized films can achieve a haunting, atmospheric brilliance. Your mileage may vary with Natural Born Killers, but it’s not its dark humor that undermines the film. As last month’s Longlegs reminded us, the genre can even thrive with zany, ridiculous villains.
What a serial-killer film cannot afford is to strain credulity. Believability has been the genre’s cornerstone since Psycho and Peeping Tom debuted in 1960. That’s why John Carpenter wisely waited until the final moments of Halloween to have Michael Myers defy the laws of nature. If Myers had survived multiple gunshots throughout the film, audiences would have been preoccupied with finding a reason for his invincibility — an explanation that only comes in the sequels. This need for authenticity is perhaps why few serial-killer films have ventured into the realm of summer blockbusters, which prioritize spectacle over realism. M. Night Shyamalan might have benefited from considering such nuances more carefully before embarking on Trap.
The film’s premise is intriguing: Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), a suburban father who moonlights as the notorious serial killer known as “the Butcher,” celebrates his daughter Riley’s (Ariel Donoghue) good grades by taking her to a concert featuring pop star Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka). Unbeknownst to Cooper, the arena is swarming with hundreds of police officers as part of a massive manhunt. While they don’t know the killer’s identity, they are certain he will be there that night.
Once the Butcher realizes he’s locked in a game of cat and mouse, he spends the night figuring out how to leave the arena whose every exit is now guarded by cops questioning any man who matches the killer’s profile. This creates a fun tension throughout the first half of the film, when we find ourselves unexpectedly rooting for the Butcher to evade justice, thanks largely to Hartnett’s charisma (more on this later) and our reluctance to see the movie end prematurely. This dynamic is undoubtedly the film’s highlight.
The movie’s plausibility gap begins rearing its head when Cooper catches a whiff of what’s happening and when his erratic behavior, which unsettles his daughter — who notes several times that her father is acting strangely — somehow goes unnoticed by everyone else around them. This includes the arena’s vendors and staff, who had been instructed to notify authorities of suspicious individuals, and the hundreds of police officers on high alert for someone like him.
This is not a failing on Hartnett’s part, who is a talented (and arguably underrated) actor. Rather, it’s a result of the director’s penchant for stilted dialogue and abrupt pivots, which don’t always work. We were willing to suspend disbelief in last year’s solid Knock at the Cabin and overlook the unnatural cadence of 2002’s Signs because their plots were extraordinary. After all, who’s to say what’s “normal” during an alien invasion? But suspense turns into eye-rolling when each twist, turn, and close call becomes more incredible than the last in a genre that demands some adherence to reality. Fooling a T-shirt vendor? Sure. Slipping past dozens of cops on high alert while acting erratically? That’s a bit much.
At least one critic has argued that Trap is Shyamalan’s take on “the power of straight white male privilege.” While this theory provides a lens through which some elements of the film — particularly some baffling police decisions in the final act — can be understood, it has serious limitations. For one, it’s Cooper’s cunning, not his race, that repeatedly throws off the authorities searching for a suspect who they believe is likely white.
The “white privilege” theory is an unfalsifiable catch-all that oversimplifies both the film’s narrative and real-world scenarios. Reasonable people can acknowledge when race is a factor in certain situations, but attributing the outcomes of killing sprees to any one cause overlooks the multitudes of variables involved. Furthermore, as cases like the L.A. Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez) and Chester Turner show, evading capture is not exclusive to white serial killers. Shyamalan may not always stick the landing, but he’s no simpleton.
A better explanation — supported by the film’s study of celebrity and the fact that we often find ourselves rooting for Cooper to outsmart the cops — is that Shyamalan is reminding us that life is much easier, and you can even get away with murder, if you’re smart and happen to look like Josh Hartnett, who, lest we forget, was a teen heartthrob early in his career. This point is first highlighted when we learn that Cooper is a firefighter and later reinforced when it’s revealed that he was once featured in his firehouse’s calendar. Fair enough, though I don’t know who still needed to hear that looking good has its perks, especially after a murderous vampire went unsuspected for centuries in The Hunger because she resembled the lovely Catherine Deneuve.
Trap certainly has its moments, especially when Hartnett is scheming, and I take no issue with summer blockbusters as vehicles for criticism. It would hardly be the first film to dabble in the macabre for deeper meaning, but movies like Se7en and American Psycho still make sense when stripped of their social commentary. I’m not sure this one does.
