In M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Trap’, Work-Life Balance Is The Real Killer
A smile reveals as much as it conceals. And in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) deploys a variety of them.
There’s the affable front he puts up while talking to a merchandise vendor (Jonathan Langdon) at the Lady Raven concert he’s attending with his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue). But it doesn’t quite work—the impression is that of a salesman peddling a not-quite-convincing impression of a human being. The smile is a little too plastered on; the expression, a little too animated; the voice, a little too forced in its cheeriness. Later, there’s the private smirk he allows himself after having infiltrated a roomful of cops at a security debriefing. Passing off as an arena employee, the slight raise of his eyebrows communicates smugness at how little the police really know. Finally, however, watching Riley dancing onstage with the popstar she loves, Cooper’s smile is stark in its contrast— a genuine, unguarded display of love.
On one level, Trap is a film about a serial killer discovering that the concert he’s at doubles as an elaborate scheme to nab him. On another, it’s also about the precariousness of maintaining a work-life balance, taken to its extreme. Like any working parent, thoughts of the job keep Cooper preoccupied, away from being fully present in the moment. Instead, he’s busy devising means of escaping the dragnet being tightened around him.
Like anyone with pressing professional commitments, he ducks out of quality family time to glance at his phone, only he’s checking a live stream of a hostage he’s kept trapped in his basement. If he stands with his arms crossed while everyone else has their phones in the air, if he remains stone-faced in a sea of teenage girls screaming with delight, and if he spends his time scanning the exits instead of focusing on the performance, well, anyone would excuse these as the actions of a dad out of his element, instead of a mass murderer for whom the walls are closing in.
Hartnett’s recent roles have all riffed on the idea of what a “family man” constitutes. In his brief appearance in The Bear, he’s a stepfather trying to navigate the idea of a blended family as best he can. Though we don’t see much of his equation with his stepdaughter, a quick glimpse of his character’s nail polish hints at them having a loving relationship. As physicist Ernest Lawrence in Oppenheimer, he summons righteous indignation on behalf of another family—his initial decision to testify against J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) stems from believing that his friend died of a heart attack after learning of his wife’s affair with the scientist. It’s in Black Mirror, however, that this image curdles. As the astronaut David, he’s driven to such grief and madness by the loss of his family that it drives him to murder.
In Trap, Cooper’s identity as a doting father initially acts as a shield, helping him stave off scrutiny. When he prompts Riley to let another girl have the last t-shirt in stock at the concert, his gentle parenting and “family values” impress the vendor, who’s taken in enough by Cooper’s charm that he lets slip details of the sting operation. By the end of their conversation, he thinks nothing of handing the serial killer a boxcutter.
The scene is a bit of winking fun that Shyamalan lets the audience in on, playing on the gulf between our knowledge of Cooper’s secret identity and his targets’ blissful ignorance. It’s a gag that recurs when the parent of a classmate Riley fell out with gets agitated over what she perceives to be Cooper’s lack of urgent interest in resolving the conflict. “Don’t mess with me,” she warns, all pointing fingers and raised voice. “I have a dark side.”
If only she knew who she was talking to.
As much as Riley’s presence helps propel Cooper’s plans of escape—inventing a sob story about her is what eventually gets them backstage—fatherhood is also its own trap. Though Cooper frequently leaves his daughter to scout the venue for potential exit routes, he’s compelled to keep returning to check on her. His commitment to making sure she has a good time—the concert is not only her reward for good grades, but a respite from the bullying she’s been facing at school—means he can’t let anything ruin this outing. Not the humdrum suburban drama of another pushy parent, not his alter ego’s horrific acts of violence finally coming home to roost.
As it progresses, Trap also operates on meta-textual levels, too. It’s simultaneously a director making a concert film as a showcase for his real-life daughter, about a protagonist trying to do right by his, despite the clear danger it presents to him. In Signs, Shyamalan cast himself as a man responsible for the death of a mother (Patricia Kalember) during a road accident, his guilt and devastation at the destruction of a nuclear family on full display. Then there’s Old, in which the director cameoed as a bus driver gleefully ferrying his characters to their deaths. His role in Trap sees him inadvertently lead a serial killer right to his real-life daughter, giving the film a self-reflective bent on the idea of a work-life balance and how one can’t area help but bleed into the other.
It’s an idea he first explored with The Sixth Sense, which opens with a child psychologist’s (Bruce Willis) professional failing shattering his domestic tranquility when a former patient (Donnie Wahlberg) breaks into his home and shoots him. The parental desire to protect is a recurring theme in Shyamalan’s works. But Trap, like The Village, asks: what if the person you have to protect them from is yourself?
Cooper has no compunctions about hurting other girls. When an explosion he’s rigged leaves a restaurant employee scarred, the camera hones in on only half of his face. To see the whole picture would be to see him as both, a good dad, and a terrifyingly effective criminal. His insistence that he’s tried to keep the two halves of his life separate, however, is ultimately revealed to be hollow. The police profile of him as a smart, methodical killer is juxtaposed against him scrambling at the concert, attempting to escape without upsetting his daughter.
Then there’s all that talk of the jewelry he’s gifted Riley and his wife Rachel (Alison Pill), the uncomfortable suggestion being that they’re trophies from his victims. An early conversation in which he tries to familiarize himself with Gen Z slang, asking Riley what the meaning of “crispy” is, becomes terrifyingly recontextualized towards the end. What has his whole life been if not an act of gathering information and trying to blend in?
And how much of our lives can we really keep hidden from the people who know us best? Cooper’s mask of affability has helped him evade trained professionals, but he can’t fool his family. He’s haunted by visions of his mother (Marcia Bennett), the first person to notice he was “different”. At the concert, Riley points out how suspicious he’s been acting. And—as a late info drop reveals—it’s Rachel who first suspected of him leading a double life.
What frames the film as an ode to his family is Shyamalan casting his daughter as a symbol of forgiveness and peace. When Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) gives a mid-concert speech about finally letting go of her anger at the father who abandoned her, the scene could have come across as an instance of popstar-manufactured intimacy, a famous singer’s attempt to make each of her fans feel seen by revealing she too has anxieties, just like them. Instead, in playing up her courage and resourcefulness, Shyamalan locates hope in the next generation’s ability to break cycles of generational trauma. By the end, Lady Raven’s speech inadvertently provides a roadmap for Riley to heal and move on from her father’s ultimate betrayal. The concert might have led to Cooper being trapped, but in taking Riley there in the first place, he’s set her free.
Categorized:Editorials
