Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) seems like a great guy. He’s a Philadelphia firefighter with broad shoulders, a chiseled jaw and a gentle smile. He’s a loving husband and father. When we meet him, he is attending a concert with his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue)—endearingly awkward as he mangles teen slang and tries to support her through painful friend drama. We know right away that this is someone we can trust, the sort of person we would like to have as a neighbor or a friend.
Then, when no one’s around, he pulls up a surveillance camera app to check on the weeping man he is keeping chained in a basement. And we realize that we don’t know Cooper at all.
“Trap,” the latest film from master of suspense M. Night Shyamalan, is about the precarious balancing act of living a double life. The more out-of-synch your public and private lives are, the tougher the balance is to maintain. The key is keeping those lives separate, and Cooper—a brutal, methodical serial killer known as the Butcher—is very good at that.
But a crisis throws him off-balance: The F.B.I. got a lead that the Butcher would be at the concert, and they have set up an elaborate sting operation to capture him. With the two sides of his double life on a collision course, Cooper has to escape without revealing his dark secret to his pursuers or his daughter.
Shyamalan spins a delightfully gonzo thriller out of Cooper’s increasingly desperate attempts. Always a formally confident and stylistically daring filmmaker, here Shyamalan and Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom have a lot of fun with the limitations and opportunities of setting a movie during a concert. The camera stays close to Cooper, often locking us into his perspective while he scans the space for potential escapes and creating a growing sense of claustrophobia as his options shrink. That uncomfortable intimacy is enhanced by straight-down-the-lens close-ups in the style of Jonathan Demme (appropriate, since Shyamalan pitched this film as “Silence of the Lambs” at a Taylor Swift concert). Later, when another character finds themselves in a space where Cooper is in control, the camera revolves around them in a disorienting arc shot as they try to get their bearings. In a story about the thin line between performance and reality, even the camera makes everything subjective.
The film is anchored by a career-best performance from Hartnett, who is at once charming, terrifying and hilarious (despite the dark story, “Trap” is possibly Shyamalan’s funniest movie). True to the film’s theme of double lives, he’s equally convincing whether he’s awkwardly trying to exit a conversation with another parent or sitting icy and composed with a butcher knife in hand. His performance especially shines because the rest of the ensemble imbue their roles with such grounded, genuine humanity—particularly Donoghue’s Riley and Alison Pill as Cooper’s wife, Rachel.
As pop star Lady Raven, singer-songwriter Saleka Shyamalan (the director’s daughter) embodies Cooper’s opposite: a woman whose personal life is intensely public and evinces vulnerability in every word and gesture. (Certainly there could be—and are—films that would cast a more critical eye on a pop star’s fishbowl existence, but in “Trap” her fame unexpectedly becomes a tool for good.)
“Trap” is most fun and interesting when it blurs the lines between Cooper’s two lives. He is aided by his predatory instincts, but he also weaponizes his affable girl-dad charm and his daughter’s obvious innocence to access restricted parts of the arena. Deception is survival for Cooper; he believes that he is incapable of sincere emotion and that his family is a convenient front. But throughout the film we also see him hesitate when his plans risk endangering or even upsetting his daughter. What is real, and what is performance? Is Cooper the sadistic murderer or the loving dad? Is it possible that he is both?
“Trap” calls to mind real-life stories like that of the B.T.K. Killer—a man who murdered at least 10 people but was also a father, Cub Scout leader and president of his Lutheran church council. There are countless other examples in politics, Hollywood, sports and, of course, the church. The clerical sex abuse crisis taught us that people who display public piety can still do horrible things in private with, seemingly, a minimum of cognitive dissonance. “Trap” taps into our mixed fascination and horror at that sort of deception, and how it cuts both ways. Living a double life requires lying to everyone around you, but it also requires lying to yourself.
As Cooper learns, you can only keep up the facade for so long, and when the truth comes out, it has devastating consequences. Again, we know this. I think about when someone commits an act of terror and reporters interview their loved ones, who appear baffled as they try to reconcile the person they knew with the horror of their actions. The true price of a double life is not the stress of maintaining it, but the damage done when it all falls apart.
Of course, you don’t have to be a serial killer to live a double life. Shyamalan infuses the film with his own anxieties about balancing fatherhood with his artistic career (an element crystallized by the metatextual casting of his daughter). That gave me something to think about as a father, a faith leader and an artist. Am I always the person I present myself to be in a retreat talk or an essay? Am I always the person that my kids think I am? No, inevitably. And when I fail, when I sin, it’s tempting to think: That’s not really me. But it’s all me, the good and the bad. And that, “Trap” suggests, might be the scariest thing of all.
“Trap” is in theaters now.
