It’s a weird, brief, and unexpected return to the dusty WordPress, but here I am – inspired not by any of the many solidly good, tender, provocative, and even mind-bending movies I’ve seen since 2021, but M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap. This is arguably less a critique of the movie itself than a cathartic scream of anger, confusion, and curiosity — curiosity not in response to any twist (a pathologically embedded trope – *read trap* – of the Nolan’s and Shamylan’s), but really a question of how and why.
I grew up as a lover of Hitchcock — not the guy, but the legacy — and his ability to write, layer, and infuse the mediocrity of character and world with psychological and allegorical substance. Even with dips along the way (especially in his later career, e.g. Marnie), he managed to always bring a forceful eye and awareness and darkly comedic core to his films. He was nothing if not consistent and insistent, even when that insistence exposed much of his own misogyny and, frankly, unforgivable treatment of the actresses he worked with.
I say this all as a preface and a pointed self-check when it comes Hitchcock — not a defense. Maybe I’m seeing things too linearly, but golly-fuck, Shyamalan, what happened? After some formative fan-girl moments in the late ’90’s/early aughts, I thought Shyamalan was it: intentional, creative, narratively complex (not my 9-year-old words), and self-aware. He had Hitchcocks’s same penchant for familiar actors (Bruce), cheeky cameos (“Don’t open my pantry, Father.”), and artful trickery in suspense (“I see dead people.”) that planted the toxic and paranormal into the mundane. But goddamn, the fall from grace — even the “so-bad-it’s-good” kind of grace — was sudden and jolting with Trap. Not only is it overtly a vanity project, posturing Shyamalan’s singer/song-writer daughter Saleka Shyamalan (very much not an actor) as the lead counterpoint to Cooper (Josh Hartnett) in a game of witless wits when he brings his daughter to a T Swift-styled concert, but the WRITING. THE WRITING. I’m good with camp — love it, even — but everything in terms of plot, execution, and writing made me feel bored, played, a little insulted, and annoyed.
With credit to cultural critic Linda Holmes, the greatest missed opportunity of the whole damn project was not having Haley Mills — star of the original 1961 Parent Trap and playing the psychological profiler who is tracking Cooper — deliver some modest nugget of smug self-awareness after cuffing the cornered girl-dad: “Well, looks like what we got here is a parent trap.”
Back soon. Maybe.
Cine qua non 