I’ve spent a lot of my free time this summer in a reading group going through Flannery O’Connor’s novels and short stories. So I’ve seen fewer movies than I did last winter and spring. There are mediocre reviews and ratings of M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller Trap (on Rotten Tomatoes it’s getting a 47 percent from critics and a 63 percent from viewers).
But M. Night won. I decided not to wait for streaming. It’s 100 degrees outside. And there was that suspicious delta between the 47 percent rating critics were giving and the 63 percent given by viewers (presumably Shyamalan viewers, a distinction not unlike that between voters and likely voters).
Shyamalan wouldn’t be a bad director to take a crack at O’Connor, perhaps her final novel The Violent Bear It Away (1961). In most O’Connor fiction there’s a character who is at least a borderline sociopath—sometimes a Holy Roller, sometimes a con artist, sometimes a convicted murderer who escaped from prison. In some of her stories someone has multiple personality disorder, and her weirdo protagonists can be interpreted as either crazy or demonically possessed when they start hearing and obeying the voices in their heads.
Shyamalan has also wandered this borderland between the theological and the psychiatric. In his very good but strange Knock at the Cabin last year, he reworked that biblical story of Job, with not G-d but a collection of madmen who purported to be prophets demanding that a white gay male couple with an adopted Asian daughter pick one member of their family to sacrifice to prevent apocalyptic plagues.
Trap involves not malevolent aliens (Signs), nor mad prophets (Knock at the Cabin), nor mutant humans (Wayward Pines), nor ghosts (Sixth Sense), but a contemporary serial killer. This killer, The Butcher, is more like the Kansas BTK killer (“bind, torture, kill”) than John Wayne Gacy: his victims aren’t sexual objects and are of a variety of races and ages and both genders. But he toys with them before killing and makes displays of their body parts afterward.
The Trap, or one of the first traps, in the story, is a giant stadium with a concert that every teenage girl in the Philadelphia area must see. Somehow the FBI has learned that The Butcher will be there, and so the concert is surrounded and the 3000 adult men in attendance, who often came with their daughters, will be interrogated on their way out, under the direction of a senior FBI profiler played by Hayley Mills. Mills is good in the role but even if she weren’t, Shyamalan casting the schemer from the first Parent Trap in this parent Trap is too good a joke not to cast her. Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka plays Lady Raven, and maybe a third of the movie is at her concert where there’s real choreography, backup dancers, and Saleka singing. (Saleka, a singer-songwriter, has been in her father’s movies before, all the way back to Signs.) Trap is a concert movie.
It’s also Hitchcockian. At first, we don’t know who the Butcher is, and even once we learn we don’t know whether there may be accomplices. There are constant twists and turns, and one of the major ones involves M. Night also appearing in the film in a pivotal role (with dialogue). Both Saleka and M Night Shyamalan are good.
I can tell you one thing. After you’ve seen the movie, think about whether it is a permutation of Presumed Innocent, as I believe it is.
Find me on Twitter (@powellmajors) and tell me why or why not.