Except that he’s not. Whatever else one can say about
Shyamalan—pro or con—his deconstructionist side comes from a place of genuine
respect and affection. Recall that the notorious (and underrated) “bedtime
story” Lady in the Water was a movie
about protecting a nymph named Story from evildoers and you get a sense of
Shyamalan’s religious faith in narrative; even if his approach can skirt (or
sometimes sink) into convolution—into a litany of fastidiously delineated
rules, limits and gimmicks—he works to play fair with the audience on whatever
terms he’s set. Such straightforwardness is, in and of itself, a balm: In a
moment where a younger generation of horror filmmakers is celebrated for
“elevating” their material, Shyamalan focuses solely on execution. Shot in
swooping, fluid camera movements by the gifted Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Trap is elegant and propulsive, especially in its first half, but
it’s also got some welcome dilapidation around the edges: Instead of trying to
gentrify genre, its maker is happy to inhabit it.
Home, it should be said, is where the heart is in
Shyamalan’s cinema, and it’s also a consistent locus of horror: the most
unsettling sequences of his career were the ones in Unbreakable where a hulking sociopath took an entire family
prisoner, forcibly occupying their residence in a terrifying pantomime of
residential-neighborhood normalcy (“this is a nice house…can I come in?”)
Without getting too deep into the weeds about Trap’s plot, or or the extent to which it does or doesn’t commit to
its initial escape-room conceit, it does eventually intersect significantly with Shyamalan’s
enduring themes of domesticity. Yet where he often gives us images of home
intrusion, this time the proverbial call is coming from inside the house. The
structural and logistical engineering by which Trap maneuvers its featured characters into differently dangerous
locations and configurations is simultaneously intricate and outrageous: the
question, which grows more urgent and skeptical as Trap barrels along, is whether all this humid, hothouse atmosphere
will ultimately yield the same torrential downpours of feeling as Unbreakable, Lady in the Water, or
2021’s Old, which didn’t so much
transcend its neo-Twilight Zone logline
of a cove whose visitors age with unnatural speed (say it with me: “there’s
something wrong with this beach!”) as unlock the transcendence latent within
it.
Spoiler alert: It doesn’t, or at least not enough to gain
the film entry to the first rank of Shyamalan’s filmography. Auteurism can be a
slippery slope, and for those of us sympathetic to both Shyamalan’s virtuoso
style and guileless sensibility (a tougher sell for the realist-cynic film
critics sent up so memorably by Lady in
the Water’s tweedy human villain), it’s tempting to argue that Trap’s various ostensible deficiencies
are in fact subtle or eccentric
strengths. For instance: If one were to say the Lady Raven concert isn’t quite
convincing as Swiftian spectacle, that could be taken as evidence of wry music
industry satire, a la Old’s hilarious inclusion of a Top 40
hip-hopper dubbed “Mid-Sized Sedan.” Similarly, the fact that Shyamalan has
made an almost completely spotless, bloodless film about a guy called “The
Butcher” might be finessed as a critique of multiplex squeamishness, or even a
byproduct of Cooper’s oft-invoked—and convincingly acted—obsessive-compulsive
disorder.
