‘Trap’ Review: M. Night Shyamalan Ensnares Josh Hartnett in Fiendishly Clever Thriller

In M. Night Shyamalan’s tense but psychologically spurious 2016 film “Split,” a group of young girls were trapped by a serial killer in a tiny, secluded room, and forced to figure out how to escape. Shyamalan’s new film “Trap” cleverly reverses that premise: A serial killer, trapped in a giant public building and surrounded by police officers at every exit, is also trying to escape — but do we even want him to?

“Trap” stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper, a firefighter taking his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donaghue, “Wolf Like Me”) to see her favorite musician, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). As they work their way inside the crowded venue, Cooper notices police stationed everywhere, a lot more than usual, and given Lady Raven’s incredible popularity that’s saying something.

It’s only when Cooper makes nice with a friendly merch salesman (Jonathan Langdon, “Zombies 3”) that he finds out this is all a trap to catch a notorious murderer, “The Butcher.” That’s going to be inconvenient for everyone when they try to leave and each have to get searched by the cops, but it’s especially inconvenient for Cooper because as we learn very early on — so early it’s in the film’s trailers, and couldn’t possibly qualify as a spoiler by any reasonable definition — Cooper is The Butcher.

Thanks to security camera footage and a discarded ticket receipt, the cops know the killer is in this building, and that he looks like one of only a handful of people. Cooper won’t be able to leave without getting caught, so he has to figure out how to sneak out without alerting the police, or his own daughter.

It’s a contrived set-up but once it’s complete, “Trap” is a fiendishly clever thriller. Emphasis on the word “fiend.” It’s not that we want The Butcher to get out of this little pickle, heavens no, it’s that he might just be smart enough — and lucky enough — to do it, justice and/or karma be damned.

Actually if anything, karma has betrayed us all. M. Night Shyamalan’s dastardly screenplay gives Cooper all the tools he needs.

Still, it’s difficult to make an audience excited to watch a serial killer escape to kill and kill again, so “Trap” whips together some narrative turns that send the plot in unexpected directions. Whether those directions take the audience where we want to go is a little besides the point, because they take us where we need to go. Without those turns the plot wouldn’t make any sense, the story would have no point, and by the end we’d have little reason to care about anything that just happened.

That’s the second most brilliant thing about “Trap” — the way it eschews conventional thriller revelations in favor of unexpected character decisions. The third most brilliant thing is Josh Hartnett’s impressively wicked, funny, and almost sympathetic performance. But the most brilliant thing was casting “The Parent Trap” star Hayley Mills as a forensic psychologist who is, quite literally, trying to trap a parent. It’s a shame the Oscar for “Best Casting” won’t debut for another year, because “Trap” should have been a frontrunner for that gag alone.

Like many excellent thrillers “Trap” doesn’t hold up to the closest scrutiny. Cooper has to manipulate his environment and the crowd in increasingly unsubtle ways to avoid detection, but we know there are security cameras everywhere and the police are watching them. Even if they weren’t looking at the exact moment Cooper caused a ruckus, they know all about the ruckus, and surely could have rewound the video a few minutes and seen him do his evil work.

But at some point you have to accept that if we want this movie to happen some sacrifices in logic have to be made. That’s almost certainly why Shyamalan encourages us not to think like the cops but instead think like the killer, and not look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially since the gift horse is Shyamalan himself, in one case quite literally.

“Trap” doesn’t have the depth of Shyamalan’s most important films or the theatricality of his most memorably weird experiments. But it’s one of his best thrillers. A tightly wound, devilishly fun, mean little film that dares us to consider the serial killer genre from new angles. Just like Hartnett’s despicable villain, it’s easy to get caught up in Shyamalan’s sticky and suspenseful web.

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