If you are a person who gets hung up on narrative logic or plausibility, M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap” is not for you.
Are you the kind of person who can’t accept that Shyamalan’s unnerving “Signs” pivots on aliens who’re allergic to water landing on a planet of water? While watching “The Visit,” do you wonder why a woman would drop off her children to see her parents that she herself hasn’t seen in years without peeking in the door to be sure that said parents are okay? If you are this kind of audience member, “Trap” isn’t for you.
“Trap” is an M. Night Shyamalan movie through and through, which is to say that it is alternatingly inspired and stark raving mad. As with Nicolas Cage, you can’t have the inspiration from Shyamalan without the madness. Cage and Shyamalan are artists who color outside the lines, and for their commitment to themselves, I grant them leeway that I don’t grant artists who create work that’s more of a piece but less memorable.
Rather than documenting the many, many, many plot points in “Trap” that don’t correspond to life as lived on this planet, I’ll say that Shyamalan as always requires an enormous expenditure of good faith here. For this film to work, you need to believe that a man can wander around a stadium during a concert, snatching badges and eavesdropping on F.B.I. debriefings. You need to accept or tolerate the idea that a pop star in the mold of Taylor Swift would be accessible by normal people, and would take a risky interest in a family that she’s never before met.
But if you’re a Shyamalan head accustomed to and even fond of his highly personal brand of cray cray, you may find “Trap” to be an eerie and resonant late-summer thriller. The premise is ingenious: Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is taking his teen daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see a Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) concert in Philadelphia. As they enter the stadium, Cooper notices an unusually intense and heightened police presence, in which he is unusually interested.
For a slow burn of a first hour, Shyamalan shifts between Cooper’s attempts to please his daughter and his escalating need to understand what the police are doing. Shyamalan is committed to the bit: we feel as if we’re seeing the entirety of the Lady Raven concert as it’s engulfed by a thriller. The little details aren’t on the level of Alfred Hitchcock, but they’re effective. A platform opens out of the floor to reveal a guest singer, and Cooper, contemplating an escape plan, tries to talk his daughter into crawling down into the passageway with him. Cooper’s flippancy when proposing this idea, as if it’s just another whim of a square dad trying to please his daughter, is creepy.
The Shyamalan twist, revealed in the trailers and sprung 20 minutes into the movie, is that the police are looking for a serial killer and Cooper is that killer. If you happen to remember Joseph Rubin’s chilling 1980s-era thriller “The Stepfather,” in which a bland husband was also a severe control freak and maniac, Cooper will feel familiar.
There’s a current of dread and satire in Shyamalan’s premise, which reveals a “daddy-daughter day” to be the misleading frosting atop a maw of madness and infrastructural collapse. Underneath a seemingly tightly controlled concert are all sorts of fissures into which a knowing or merciless person can poke. Given the reliably insane rollercoaster of, say, our presidential election cycle, is such a premise really so hard to believe?
The notion of a stadium event as the setting for a paranoid thriller recalls a movie with, yes, Nicolas Cage, the 1998 Brian De Palma thriller “Snake Eyes,” which is similarly insane, stylish, and disinterested in humoring the part of the audience that Hitchcock dismissively deemed the “plausibles.” “Trap” doesn’t have the formalist sizzle of De Palma or Shyamalan joints like “Unbreakable” or “Signs,” but his command of this setting is still the stuff of a classicist. Shyamalan doesn’t shoot anonymous “coverage,” his fluid camera tethers the viewer to Cooper as he eases into Lady Raven’s orbit.
Like most Shyamalan thrillers, “Trap” does feel hemmed in by its PG-13 rating. One yearns for this thing to go truly over the top, which it does, but with cathartic violence in the De Palma tradition, which it doesn’t. But the awkward sense of goody-goody vagueness that hems in “Trap,” and many other Shyamalan films, is a feature in addition to being a bug. The sense of constriction, of the desperately unsaid and unseen, intensifies a story that is once again concerned with the hidden violence and mania inherent to seemingly normal people and to vast events that pressure parents to cough up money, and workers to maintain constant vigilance lest the arrival of an interloper.
Harnett occasionally overdoes it in his best role in decades, but his eyes embody a tension between a need to be the dad of his daughter’s dreams and his own drive to honor his own hunger. When Cooper runs into a tightly wound mother, his madness is indistinguishable at first glance from her over-compensating chirpiness. It’s the film’s subtlest and most haunting little joke.
Annie Baker’s “Janet Planet” also deals with a parent who can’t give herself over entirely to her child, and one of the film’s great strengths is Baker’s ambiguous view of this deficiency. Janet (Julianne Nicholson) isn’t a monstrous mom, far from it, as she respects her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), and talks to the girl openly and maturely about difficult issues. Baker understands, however, that a person can be her version of fully available while still feeling to someone else — perhaps someone far needier, such as say, an adolescent — as if they are withholding something.
“Janet Planet” is set over a summer in the early 1990s in rural Massachusetts. Lacy’s needy oddness is established right off in a droll opening scene in which she calls Janet to pick her up from summer camp because she feels that no one likes her. Janet obliges, though Lacy discovers in the interim that she was liked after all. Oh well, too late, home they go, to an expansive cabin somewhere in the country where Janet runs an acupuncture clinic and lives with her boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton).
Wayne gets your guard up. He is a heavy presence and clearly tormented and Lacy is oblivious in terms of giving him room. As a middle-aged man who is a veteran of awkward conversations with the teenage daughter of a girlfriend, I have to say that the scenes between Wayne and Lacy are a marvel of truthful weirdness. Wayne isn’t the abusive thug that films with these sorts of scenarios cause you to fear; in his way, he strives to be polite until Lacy exhausts his patience. Baker allows you to understand that Lacy is annoying —this is a remarkably unsentimental portrait of a teenage girl — without compromising your empathy with her. And you can also understand why Wayne would struggle with this child, especially as Lacy tap-dances over his sore spots.
The summer progresses, and Janet and Lacy get into a variety of bohemian adventures while two other people fritter in and out of their cabin, Regina (Sophie Okonedo) and Avi (Elias Koteas). These characters are vivid as well, but the air begins to leak out of “Janet Planet,” partially by design. The point of the film, after all, is Lacy’s gradual disillusion with mom and her needs for lovers and hangers-on. In a superb conversation in bed, Janet admits these fallacies to Lacy. But admission can be a deep form of denial.
Baker is a Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright making her feature filmmaking debut here, and “Janet Planet” has that studied, rarefied air of the pregnant unsaid that often springs from films by theater people. Baker’s pared-down, mercilessly blunt yet somehow still unresolved dialogue is her most powerful means of expression and, given Lacy’s interest in theater, one presumes this movie is autobiographical. Like most theater-people moves, “Janet Planet” is honed and planned and textually sculpted within an inch of its life. It’s a film that you can admire yet tire of watching.
The movie is readymade for people who read The New Yorker. It is bougie and in love with its own insularity and yet it’s somehow impressive, poignant and faintly irritating. How can Janet and Lacy live in this sprawling cabin on acupuncture treatments? Money, the biggest taboo of cinema, even more taboo than sex, isn’t mentioned. And anytime a scene is about to come to a head, Baker nips it in the bud so as to preserve a sense of pent-up emotional subtext that begins to scan as timidity.
“Janet Planet” has extraordinary scenes, but why are American indies so timid and polite these days? I came of age in the 1990s, and that indie scene was nuts. And look at the 1970s: John Cassavetes’ films alone would take a year off modern audiences’ lives.
“Trap” is now in theaters everywhere. “Janet Planet” is now streaming on demand.
