After an excellent turn in last year’s phenomenal Oppenheimer, Josh Hartnett returns to the screen with more compelling work in Trap, a ludicrous thriller that’s lucky to have him at its center. 

The surprisingly unclever cat-and-mouse saga comes courtesy of inescapable auteur M. Night Shyamalan, whose bleak Knock at the Cabin last year sported a similarly strong lead performance by Dave Bautista. By comparison, this latest effort is unmistakably pulpier and not tied down by Knock’s apocalyptic glumness, but it also doesn’t seem to be tied to any kind of reality that resembles our own. 

Suspension of disbelief can be crucial to making certain convoluted movies work, but Trap is playing in a different arena altogether. If it were competing in the Contrivance Olympics, it would easily win a gold medal.

Hartnett stars as Cooper Adams, a seemingly earnest father to teenage Riley (Ariel Donoghue), who scores big points by winning tickets to a sold-out concert fronted by pop megastar Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). 

As he and his daughter make their way to the floor seats, Cooper becomes curious about the increased police presence, and when buying a T-shirt for Riley, a merch vendor fills him in. It turns out the show was actually planned by the FBI so they could nab a notorious serial killer known as The Butcher, who is expected to be somewhere in the audience. It’s at this point we learn that Cooper is The Butcher. We see the majority of the ensuing events through his eyes, as he desperately tries to evade security while trying to find a way out of the arena without arousing suspicion.

At least at the outset, Trap inadvertently mirrors In a Violent Nature, another recent film that follows the perspective of a serial killer, albeit with different motivations for each of the twisted protagonists. But the horrifying beauty of that movie lies in its simplicity in terms of narrative structure and visual storytelling. Shyamalan’s is obviously the more commercially friendly of the two and arguably has an even more tantalizing elevator pitch. But as has become an issue in Shyamalan’s more recent work, it can’t pay off its setup in an equally satisfying way. All of the promotional material for Trap lets us in on what would seem to be the movie’s biggest twist, which naturally causes the audience to ask, “OK, so what else is there?” The answer, sadly, is not much.

Trap is at its best when we’re in lockstep with Cooper’s thinking and we’re forced to empathize with the manic plight of a killer. Naturally, this is where Hartnett shines the most, too, vacillating between cold-blooded psychopathy and dorky dad energy around his daughter and a clingy parent who keeps engaging with him. 

Shyamalan has a way of not only writing, but directing, an uncanny way of speaking that can ring hollow in his more serious efforts. But here, Hartnett indulges this idiosyncratic delivery style and makes a meal of it. It works because Cooper himself is putting on a show for everyone in his life, which Shyamalan extenuates with close-ups that depict Cooper desperately trying to bury anxiety with a chipper veneer.

But there’s only so much Hartnett can do, and Trap simply doesn’t have enough tricks up its sleeve to make Cooper’s attempted exile worthwhile. 

Without giving too much away, the film shift’s narrative subjectivity away from Cooper around the hour mark, and suffice it to say the quality of acting from the rest of the ensemble isn’t at Hartnett’s level. 

I don’t inherently have an issue with Shyamalan casting his daughter Saleka as a pop star who comes off like an amalgam of Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, but let’s say her musical ability outstrips her acting talents and leave it at that. His other daughter Ishana made her directorial debut this year with The Watchers, which certainly had its issues but showcased a promise of growth. 

With Trap, Shyamalan reminds us he may be imprisoned in his own mindset of enticing storytelling that can’t stick the landing.

New movies coming this weekend

• Coming only to theaters is Borderlands, an action comedy starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart, adapting the popular video game for the big screen with a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
• Also playing in theaters is It Ends With Us, a romantic drama starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, involving a young woman who begins a relationship with a charming neurosurgeon who soon reveals a darker side that reminds her of her parents’ fraught relationship.
• Streaming on Apple TV+ is The Instigators, a heist comedy starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, centering around a botched robbery that causes two thieves to go on the run, dragging along one of their therapists in the process.