Josh Hartnett the perfect serial killer in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap

TRAP ★★★½

(M) 105 minutes

Whatever else might be said of him, M. Night Shyamalan is a family guy. Earlier this year he served as producer of The Watchers, the first film directed by his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan. Trap, his latest film as writer-director, stars Josh Hartnett as a doting suburban dad accompanying his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a daytime stadium concert given by the fictional pop idol Lady Raven, played by Saleka Shyamalan, the director’s niece.

Outwardly, it’s a perfectly innocent event, along Taylor Swift lines but skewing younger, the kind of thing where the star accompanies herself on a grand piano and lectures the crowd about the importance of forgiveness.

But this being a Shyamalan film, all is not as it appears. In fact, the entire concert has been set up as a trap for a local serial killer known as the Butcher (staging a potentially violent showdown in the midst of thousands of screaming teenage fans may not sound ideal, but M. Night has never been one to let plausibility get in the way of a good yarn).

On top of that is another surprise, which I might hesitate to give away except it’s revealed within the first five minutes. So here goes: Hartnett’s character Cooper is the Butcher, discreetly using his phone to keep tabs on his latest terrified victim (Mark Bacolcol), held captive in a basement somewhere in the city.

It’s a morbid scenario played largely for gleeful black comedy, especially in the long section of the film that unfolds during the concert. Knowing that cops are monitoring all the exits, Cooper keeps slipping away searching for an escape route, showing an ingenuity worthy of Bruce Willis in a Die Hard sequel when it comes to swiping a security pass or staging an accident with a deep fryer to cover his tracks.

The joke is that he’s little different from the average bloodthirsty American movie hero (and also, perhaps, that in Shyamalan’s eyes a clean-cut middle-aged white guy can get away with anything). Hartnett, once a teen idol, gives a very funny performance, letting us see the effort it takes for Cooper to arrange his features in an approximation of friendly goodwill.

Long-term fans of Shyamalan will find much to relish, including the unpredictable shifts of visual and narrative point of view, and the flip, if not outright satirical, attitude to conventional psychology. Cooper is a genuinely loving father who also happens to be a sadistic killer – and while he’s eventually supplied with a backstory of sorts, these characteristics continue to exist side by side rather than being meaningfully linked.

While Cooper doesn’t have a motive for his crimes in any usual sense, he does have a trigger: he gets antsy whenever he’s around people who “think they’re whole”. (That’s why he likes to cut them into pieces.) Like most of us, Shyamalan probably aspires to wholeness at least some of the time – but going by Trap, it seems possible that being divided is his secret strength.

Trap is now in cinemas.

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