Trap (2024 film)

Trap is a 2024 American psychological thriller film written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, and Alison Pill, it follows a serial killer evading a police blockade while attending a concert with his daughter.
The film was shot in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in late 2023. It premiered in New York City on July 24, 2024, and was theatrically released in the United States by Warner Bros. Pictures on August 2, 2024. It received mixed reviews from critics and grossed $83 million on a $30 million budget.
Philadelphia firefighter Cooper takes his teenage daughter, Riley, to pop star Lady Raven's concert as a reward for her good grades. There, Cooper notices the unusually high police presence around the concert venue. He learns from a vendor named Jamie that the FBI plans to catch a serial killer known as "the Butcher," having learned he will be in attendance. Cooper, who is the Butcher, secretly checks footage on his phone of his latest captive victim, Spencer, in a basement. He steals Jamie's ID card and learns the passphrase that will identify him as an employee, using the card to gain access to a back room and steal a police radio.
Hearing a woman predicting his movements over the radio, Cooper sets off an explosion in a food stand's kitchen and uses the chaos to access the roof where he learns from a police officer that the manhunt is led by Dr. Josephine Grant, an FBI profiler. Confused by Cooper's behavior, Riley asks him to stay with her. She talks about being chosen as Lady Raven's "Dreamer Girl" who gets to dance on stage with the singer and receives backstage access, which Cooper believes contains the only exit not covered by the police. Cooper lies to Lady Raven's uncle that Riley recently recovered from leukemia, leading to her selection as the "Dreamer Girl."
However, after the concert ends, Cooper learns that police are also guarding the backstage exit. He privately reveals himself as the Butcher to Lady Raven, threatening to kill Spencer remotely if she does not escort him and Riley out in her limousine. She complies but asks to come to Riley's house, where she stalls for time by explaining the FBI operation to the family, unsettling Cooper by describing Grant's profile of him as someone with maternal issues and obsessive–compulsive disorder. She also explains that the police discovered details about the Butcher's attendance at the concert via a torn ticket receipt left in a vacant house that was reported anonymously.
Lady Raven steals Cooper’s phone and locks herself in the bathroom. She obtains details from Spencer about where he was taken and livestreams it to her fans, one of whom finds and rescues him. She outs Cooper to his wife Rachel and he locks his family upstairs while Lady Raven texts her driver to contact the police. Cooper attempts to drive off with Lady Raven, but Cooper's family escapes and distracts him long enough for her to flee into her limousine. The police arrive and Cooper flees the house through a secret tunnel before disguising himself using a SWAT uniform and driving the limousine off with Lady Raven. After he reveals his identity, she unlocks the window and draws a mob of fans to stop him so the FBI can catch up. Cooper changes into a fresh set of civilian clothes and gets away.
Cooper returns home and confronts Rachel. Rachel confesses that she suspected he was the Butcher and left the receipt in the vacant house for the police to find. Cooper decides to kill her and then himself, but Rachel persuades him to share some leftover pie she made for Riley. After Cooper expresses his rage at Rachel for causing him to miss seeing his children grow up, he realizes Rachel drugged the pie with pills from his tool bag, causing him to hallucinate his mother expressing pride in him for feeling a real emotion. He is tased by Grant and two SWAT officers as he walks up to her. As he is led away, he stops to adjust Riley's bicycle and shares a tearful embrace with her before being loaded into a police van. As it drives away, Cooper unlocks his cuffs with a spoke he secretly took from Riley's bike and laughs to himself.
In a mid-credits scene, Jamie finds out that Cooper was the Butcher while watching the news, and vows to not talk to anyone at work anymore.
In October 2022, Universal Pictures announced a then-untitled film from filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. In February 2023, the film was revealed to be titled Trap when it changed distributor, as Shyamalan and his production company Blinding Edge Pictures entered a first-look deal with Warner Bros. Pictures. The film sprouted from conversations Shyamalan had with his daughter, singer-songwriter Saleka, about combining the concert and theatrical experience and devising an album for a narrative, similar to how Prince wrote the titular album for the 1984 musical film Purple Rain. Shyamalan initially planned to let another filmmaker write the script and direct the film from his original idea for a thriller set at a concert, before changing his mind after realizing he could make the film with Saleka.
The premise was inspired in part by Operation Flagship, a 1985 sting operation in which disguised law enforcement arrested 101 wanted fugitives at a convention center, having invited them under the pretense of gifting them free NFL tickets and an opportunity to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Super Bowl XX. Shyamalan pitched Trap as setting The Silence of the Lambs (1991) at a Taylor Swift concert, in reference to her Eras Tour, and wrote the screenplay in five-and-a-half months, a personal record for him. He produced the film with Marc Bienstock and Ashwin Rajan.
Saleka stars as singer Lady Raven, whose concert the characters attend. As her father was writing the script, she composed fourteen songs for the film, designed diegetically to match the action onscreen. Saleka previously collaborated with her father by making a single for the film Old (2021) and an EP for the series Servant. Shyamalan was inspired to incorporate musical elements by Purple Rain and visiting Saleka on tour. Saleka also noted Bollywood cinema, in which music often plays a key role in the storytelling, as an influence, and listed Adele, Billie Eilish, Rihanna, Rosalía, and Taylor Swift as inspirations for her performance. She described Trap as a "Shyamalan American version of a Bollywood movie that is grounded and the songs make sense — not necessarily a musical, but completely music-centric."
As with his recent, self-funded projects, Shyamalan and a storyboard artist storyboarded the film and held extensive rehearsals with the actors. Shyamalan originally intended to frame the film in a 4:3 aspect ratio, but after a discussion with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, they agreed it limited their ability to shoot the movie and was "too much work" to create a feeling of claustrophobia. They changed it to a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and the film was re-storyboarded. Josh Hartnett did not watch any media in preparation for the role of "Cooper" to make the character his own and researched psychopathy, including books about serial killers. Shyamalan wrote Hayley Mills's investigator character as a "maternal figure" to contrast Cooper's lack of empathy. Ariel Donoghue, who plays Cooper's daughter Riley, attended school in between filming.
Principal photography was originally scheduled to begin in Cincinnati, Ohio, in August 2023, where it would have received over $9 million in tax credits from the state to film there. Production relocated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and was granted an interim agreement on September 18, 2023, to film during the SAG-AFTRA strike. Under the working title Good Grades, filming was scheduled to occur from October 16 to December 8, 2023. The film's pop concert venue, known as "Tanaka Arena", was filmed in Hamilton, Ontario, inside FirstOntario Centre, a 20,000-seat arena that the production obtained access to for two to three months because it was undergoing renovations. Toronto's Rogers Centre stood in as the venue's exterior.
Songs in the film were performed on stage as if it were a real concert. Cora Kozaris was the choreographer, and a videographer recorded onstage material and projected it onto the stadium's screens in real-time. The shoot involved thousands of extras, who were not told what the film was about but received Saleka's music beforehand to be able to sing along. Hartnett recalled multiple extras consoling him because they thought he was nervous and were unaware of the character he was playing. The order of filming consisted of audience reactions, with music playing, followed by Saleka dancing and miming on stage, and then, after the extras went quiet, actors with dialogue, with a beat track in the background to help actors maintain rhythm. Hartnett and Donoghue screamed parts of their dialogue to match the intended noise levels of a concert. For conversational scenes in which actors would look into the camera lens, Shyamalan attached a one-way mirror to the lens that would reflect off another mirror and allow the actor in close-up to see the other actor. Trap was shot on 35mm film stock, which required the crew to wait three days for dailies to be processed and returned from a film laboratory in Los Angeles to review.
Trap was released the same year as The Watchers, the directorial debut of Saleka's sister, Ishana Night Shyamalan; a poster for The Watchers appears in the background of a scene in Trap. Saleka and Ishana Shyamalan worked on their respective films on their family's property in Pennsylvania, with Saleka operating in a recording studio while Ishana mixed her film next door. Editing and mixing were completed on June 22, 2024. In August 2024, Deadline Hollywood reported the film's production budget to be $30 million.
Herdís Stefánsdóttir composed the film's score independently from Saleka. The soundtrack album, Lady Raven, features Kid Cudi and Russ (both of whom star in the film) as well as Amaarae. It was released by Columbia Records on August 2, 2024. The songs "Release", "Save Me", and "Divine" were released as singles.
Trap was released in the United States by Warner Bros. Pictures on August 2, 2024. It is the second film of Shyamalan's to be distributed by the studio after Lady in the Water (2006), and marks the filmmaker's departure from Universal Pictures, which distributed five consecutive films of his, starting with The Visit in 2015. Universal initially scheduled the film's release for April 5, 2024. In 2023, Warner Bros. acquired and pushed the film to August 2, 2024. In 2024, they postponed it a week to August 9, and later brought it forward to August 2 again.
The film premiered at Alice Tully Hall in New York City on July 24, 2024. It did not screen for critics before its theatrical release. Regarding marketing results, RelishMix described social media buzz as "mixed-positive" and Deadline Hollywood reported low awareness but high interest similar to that received by Longlegs earlier in the year. Trap's social media content accumulated 259.2 million impressions across platforms, 47 percent above norms for first-installment genre titles. The film was released on digital platforms on August 30, 2024. On November 5, 2024, it released on Blu-ray, DVD and Ultra HD Blu-ray. Trap became available to stream on Max on October 25, 2024.
Trap grossed $42.8 million in the United States and Canada, and $39.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $82.7 million.
In the United States and Canada, Trap was projected to gross $15–20 million from 3,181 theaters in its opening weekend, with one estimate at $25 million. The film made $6.6 million on its first day, including an estimated $2.2 million from Thursday night previews. It debuted to $15.5 million, finishing third at the box office behind holdovers Deadpool & Wolverine and Twisters. The film earned $6.7 million in its second weekend, shifting to sixth place, and $3.4 million in its third, dropping to eighth. It left the box office top ten in its fourth weekend with $1.7 million.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 57% of 240 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "An arch thriller given some grounding by Josh Hartnett's committed performance, Shyamalan's Trap will ensnare those who appreciate its tongue-in-cheek style while the rest will be eager to wriggle out from it." According to the website, critics thought the film was "another divisive work" from Shyamalan, "but its dark humor, tense atmosphere and a strong central performance may just be enough for fans of his work." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 52 out of 100, based on 46 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak gave it an overall positive score of 66%, with an average rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars.
Benjamin Lee of The Guardian gave the film 2/5 stars, writing, "Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it's fiendishly smart. Maybe if it was more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun." Peter Travers of ABC News wrote, "Hartnett performs miracles in making Cooper a serial butcher and a devoted family man living in the same body. You believe him, which is a trick Shyamalan otherwise fails to achieve as this misfire builds to a sequel-begging climax that ups the ante on shameless." Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson said that Shyamalan "has built a solid foundation, as he tends to do: clever setup, appealing lead actor, and an interesting (and quite relevant) cultural milieu. But fairly quickly, Trap's sleek design peels away, and we see the shoddy engineering it's been hiding."
Jesse Hassenger of The A.V. Club gave the film a B+ grade, writing that it "may cook more purely and entertainingly than anything in [Shyamalan's] last decade of self-styled pop hits. But it also suggests that there are discordant notes that he can't, and probably shouldn't, ever get out of his system." IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio gave it a B grade, calling it "too plausibility-stretching to be actually scary, but Hartnett's well-calibrated performance as a psycho dad, the type who sends PTA moms all aflutter, is too dangerously charismatic to ignore."
Filmmakers Luca Guadagnino and Drew Hancock both cited Trap as among their favorite films of 2024, with Hancock saying "The second best movie about cranberry farming I’ve seen this year. Just kidding. There is very little cranberry farming in this movie. What it does have is 105 minutes of Josh Hartnett having the time of his life. And what’s not to love about that?"
In France, Cahiers du Cinéma placed it ninth on their top 10 films of 2024.