Starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, and Alison Pill, Hayley Mills, Jonathan Langdon and Mark Bacolcol

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Warner Bros.

Cooper Abbott is a firefighter, a family man, a dad and a monster. As serial killer The Butcher, Cooper terrorises Philadelphia, dismembering his victims and leaving them in public. As a dad, he’s attending a Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) with his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue). Cooper’s off the clock. Cooper’s safe. Cooper is being hunted.

The quiet renaissance of both Josh Hartnett and M. Night Shyamalan continues.

The former has been turning in excellent work throughout his career and you need only look at his two appearances for Guy Ritchie and his scene stealing turn as Ernest Lawrence in Oppenheimer to see his range. His Cooper is a perpetually nervous, perpetually plausible mask that constantly threatens to slip and Hartnett gives this terrifying man remarkable interiority. Cooper never, ever stops thinking and seeing him test the fences he realizes are surrounding him is as engrossing as it is uncomfortable.

Cooper cares about two people, himself and his daughter. No one else is human and as a result no one else is safe. It’s a smart performance and Hartnett uses tiny, quarter second pauses to show us how hard Cooper’s working on being a citizen. Crucially, he and Shyamalan also find some goodness in him too and you can see why Cooper has operated in the dark for so long.

One of my favourite scenes here has Riley get a moment of huge validation and recognition that you can see healing her. Cooper watches from a distance, unable to feel what his daughter does, doing his best to keep his hands warm against the fire of her emotions. It’s fun, complex and dark work that Harnett and Shyamalan excel at. Ariel Donoghue too, whose Riley is perceptive enough to see that something is not right with her dad and is as manipulated as she is saved by him. There’s a generation of young actors coming up right now, and with Donoghue here and the entire cast of Alien: Romulus, it’s been a good summer for them.

The rest of the cast is where Trap does some very odd, and mostly very successful things. Perpetual MVP Alison Pill is spectacularly good in a role which starts off looking like a trope and then turns into one of the most interesting people in the movie. British cinema legend Hayley Mills is excellent as the profiler hunting Cooper, perpetually in the background and feeling like she’s the star of a different movie slowly invading this one. I’d honestly watch that movie, and hope that the slight hints of this being an introduction to a character with a larger story play out. Given her most famous role is The Parent Trap, this is also a dad joke so epic that I had to have it pointed out to me and applauded when it was.

Where the movie doesn’t so much stumble as change step is with Jonathan Langdon and Saleka Night Shyamalan. Langdon plays Jamie, the amiable venue staffer we see in the trailer. He’s charming, funny, just a little macabre and the human face of how Cooper gets away with what he does. He gets arguably the best joke of the movie too, but that joke, and his arc, speak to a frustratingly unexplored take on the story. Cooper’s homicidal celebrity is sketched out and Jamie is so much fun that not exploring this further feels not so much a wasted opportunity as one not chosen.

Likewise Saleka as Lady Raven. The obvious nepo baby charges are right there, but I think the urge to embrace those obfuscates a more interesting problem. The concert, written and performed by Saleka feels real and competent, because she’s actually a professional musician and it’s a really smart choice that gives the movie the backbone is needs. Her acting here is solid if a little flat, but that’s more due to the nature of her character Lady Raven’s life being so different from Cooper and Riley’s that she was always going to feel odd stepping out into the world as she does in the third act. It makes Cooper far more of a threat, and it breaks the movie in some very fun ways. It’s also an evolution of Shyamalan’s fondness for third act left turns and a very successful one. The issue is that, like Mills’ Doctor Josephine Grant, she feels like she’s stepped across from a different movie and never quite meshes with this one.

These are small problems for the movie to have, and neither of them break it. Rather they speak to Shyamalan’s evolution as a writer, playing with characters and concepts that change the nature of his plot instead of the audience shifting perspective change that made him an undeserved punchline for years. Their biggest issue here is they hide just how smartly laid out that third act is. The missteps you think the movie seems to have made are nothing of the sort and everything here, aside from a slightly eye roll worthy ‘OR IS IT?’, is earned.

Verdict: Smart, nasty fun and another rock-solid entry from a director in a really interesting groove. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart