Trap (2024 film)

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Trap
Directed by	M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by	Ashwin Rajan Marc Bienstock M. Night Shyamalan
Written by	M. Night Shyamalan
Starring	Josh Hartnett Ariel Donoghue Saleka Shyamalan Hayley Mills Alison Pill
Music by	Herdís Stefánsdóttir
Cinematography by	Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Editor(s)	Noëmi Preiswerk
Studio(s)	Blinding Edge Pictures
Distributor	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date(s)	July 24, 2024 (Alice Tully Hall) August 2, 2024 (United States)
Running time	105 minutes
Language	English

Trap is a 2024 American psychological thriller film written, directed and produced by M. Night Shyamalan. It stars Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, and Alison Pill.

Trap was theatrically released in the United States by Warner Bros. Pictures on August 2, 2024.

Plot

Cooper Adams, taking his teenage daughter, Riley, to pop star Lady Raven's concert as a reward for her good grades, notices the unusually high police presence around the concert venue. He learns from a vendor named Jamie that the FBI plans to catch a serial killer known as "the Butcher" at the venue with knowledge that the Butcher is in attendance. Cooper is revealed to be the Butcher himself, secretly checking footage on his phone of his latest captive victim, Spencer, in a basement. He steals Jamie's ID card and learns the pass phrase that will identify him as an employee, using the card to gain access to a back room and steal a radio.

Hearing a woman predicting his movements over the radio, Cooper sets off an explosion in a food stand's kitchen and uses the chaos to access the roof, where he learns from a police officer that the manhunt is led by Dr. Josephine Grant, an FBI profiler. Confused by Cooper's behavior, Riley asks him to stay with her. She talks about being chosen as Lady Raven's "Dreamer Girl", who gets to dance on stage with the singer and also gets backstage access, which Cooper believes has the only exit that isn't covered by the police. Cooper lies to Lady Raven's uncle that Riley recently recovered from leukemia, getting her selected to be the "Dreamer Girl".

However, after the concert ends, Cooper learns that police are also guarding the backstage exit. He privately reveals himself as the Butcher to Lady Raven, threatening to remotely kill Spencer if she does not escort him and Riley out in her limousine. She complies but asks to come to Riley's house. There, Lady Raven stalls for time by explaining the FBI operation to the family, unsettling Cooper by describing Grant's profile of him as someone with maternal issues. She also explains that the police found out about the Butcher's attendance at the concert via a torn ticket receipt left in a vacant house that was reported anonymously.

Lady Raven manages to steal Cooper's phone and locks herself in the bathroom where she gets details from Spencer about where he was taken and livestreams it to her fans, one of whom is able to find and rescue him. She outs Cooper to his wife, Rachel, and he locks his family upstairs while Lady Raven is able to call her driver and get him to contact the police. Cooper attempts to drive off with Lady Raven, but Cooper's family distract him long enough for her to escape.

The police arrive and Cooper escapes through a secret tunnel before disguising himself using a replica SWAT uniform. He stops the limousine, shoots the driver and tries to drive off. Lady Raven unlocks the window and draws a mob of fans to stop him so the FBI can catch up. A desperate Cooper is able to change into a fresh set of civilian clothes and make his way out.

Cooper returns home and confronts Rachel. Rachel confesses that she had suspected that he was the Butcher, and that she was the one who left the receipt in the vacant house for the police to find. Cooper decides to kill her and then himself, but Rachel persuades him to at least share some of the pie that was made for his daughter. Cooper admits that he feels genuine hatred towards Rachel for causing him to never see his children grow up. Cooper realizes Rachel drugged the pie with pills from his tool bag, causing him to hallucinate his mother expressing pride in him for feeling a real emotion. The hallucination turns out to be Grant, impersonating Cooper's mother to calm him down. Cooper is tased by SWAT officers as he walks up to her. He stops to adjust Riley's bike as he is led away and shares a tearful embrace with her before being loaded into a police van. As the van pulls away, Cooper starts to pick his cuffs with a bike spoke, laughing to himself.

In a mid-credits scene, Jamie is watching the news and is stunned to learn that Cooper is the Butcher.

Cast

• Josh Hartnett as Cooper
• Ariel Donoghue as Riley
• Saleka Shyamalan as Lady Raven
• Alison Pill as Rachel
• Hayley Mills as Dr. Josephine Grant
• Jonathan Langdon as Jamie
• Mark Bacolcol as Spencer
• Marnie McPhail as Jody's mom
• Kid Cudi as the Thinker
• Russ as Parker Wayne
• Marcia Bennett as Cooper's mom
• Lochlan Miller as Logan

Additionally, M. Night Shyamalan makes a cameo as Lady Raven's uncle, who works as a spotter at the concert.

Production

M. Night Shyamalan's Trap was inspired in part by Operation Flagship, a sting operation in which disguised law enforcement arrested 101 wanted fugitives at a convention center, having invited them under the pretense of gifting them free NFL tickets. The film marks Shyamalan's departure from Universal Pictures, which distributed five consecutive films of his, starting with The Visit in 2015. In October 2022, Universal announced the then-untitled film. The title was revealed in February 2023, as Shyamalan entered a first-look deal with competing studio Warner Bros. Pictures. He produced with Marc Bienstock and Ashwin Rajan, and pitched the film as setting The Silence of the Lambs (1991) at a Taylor Swift concert, in reference to her Eras Tour.

Principal photography was scheduled to begin in Cincinnati, Ohio, in August 2023, where it would have received over $9 million in tax credits from the state to film there. Production eventually relocated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Despite being distributed by a major studio, it was granted, on September 18, 2023, an interim agreement to film during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike due to Shyamalan independently financing his own films. Under the working title Good Grades, filming reportedly occurred from October 16 to December 8, 2023. The film's pop concert venue, known as "Tanaka Arena," was filmed inside FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton, Ontario, with Rogers Centre used as the venue's exterior. The production obtained access to the 20,000-seat arena for two months because it was undergoing renovations.

Shyamalan's daughter, Saleka, stars as Lady Raven, the singer whose concert the characters attend. She wrote fourteen songs for the film, designed diegetically to match the action onscreen, while her father wrote the script. Saleka previously collaborated with her father by contributing to the soundtracks for the film Old (2021) and the series Servant. Shyamalan was inspired to incorporate musical elements by visiting Saleka on tour and by Prince's musical film Purple Rain (1984). Saleka also noted that they grew up watching Bollywood cinema, in which music often plays a key role in the storytelling. She described Trap as a "Shyamalan American version of a Bollywood movie that is grounded and the songs make sense — not necessarily a musical, but completely music-centric." Cora Kozaris was the choreographer for the songs performed on stage in the film. Trap was released the same year as The Watchers, the directorial debut of Saleka's sister, Ishana Night Shyamalan; a poster for The Watchers appears in the background of a scene in Trap. Saleka and Ishana Shyamalan worked on their respective films on their family's property in Pennsylvania. Saleka operated in a recording studio while Ishana mixed her film next door. Herdís Stefánsdóttir composed the score independently from Saleka. Columbia Records will release the soundtrack.

Release

Trap was released in the United States by Warner Bros. Pictures on August 2, 2024. It is the second film of Shyamalan's to be distributed by the studio after Lady in the Water (2006), and marks the filmmaker's departure from Universal Pictures, which distributed five consecutive films of his, starting with The Visit in 2015. Universal initially scheduled the film's release for April 5, 2024. In 2023, Warner Bros. acquired and pushed the film to August 2, 2024. In 2024, they postponed it to August 9, and later brought it forward a week to August 2 again.

The film premiered at Alice Tully Hall in New York City on July 24, 2024. It did not screen for critics before its theatrical release.

Reception

Box office

In the United States and Canada, Trap was released alongside Harold and the Purple Crayon and is projected to gross $15–25 million from 3,181 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $6.6 million on its first day, including an estimated $2.2 million from Thursday night previews.

Critical response

According to the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, critics thought the film was "another divisive work" from Shyamalan, "but its dark humor, tense atmosphere and a strong central performance may just be enough for fans of his work." On the website, 47% of 89 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.5/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "An arch thriller given some grounding by Josh Hartnett's committed performance, Shyamalan's Trap will ensnare those who appreciate its tongue-in-cheek style while the rest will be eager to wriggle out from it." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 53 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.

Benjamin Lee of The Guardian gave the film 2/5 stars, writing, "Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it's fiendishly smart. Maybe if it was more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun." Peter Travers of ABC News wrote, "Hartnett performs miracles in making Cooper a serial butcher and a devoted family man living in the same body. You believe him, which is a trick Shyamalan otherwise fails to achieve as this misfire builds to a sequel-begging climax that ups the ante on shameless."Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson said that Shyamalan "has built a solid foundation, as he tends to do: clever setup, appealing lead actor, and an interesting (and quite relevant) cultural milieu. But fairly quickly, Trap's sleek design peels away, and we see the shoddy engineering it's been hiding."

Jesse Hassenger of The A.V. Club gave the film a B+ grade, writing that it "may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in [Shyamalan's] last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can't, and probably shouldn't, ever get out of his system." IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio gave it a B grade, calling it "too plausibility-stretching to be actually scary, but Hartnett's well-calibrated performance as a psycho dad, the type who sends PTA moms all aflutter, is too dangerously charismatic to ignore."

Gallery

Trivia

• This is M. Night Shyamalan's second film to be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures after Lady in the Water (2006).
• This is the first Theatrical film to use the new 2024 rendition of As Time Goes By in the opening logo.

External Links

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