‘Trap’ Was Perfect. We Talked About It for 40 Minutes.

Warning: Spoilers below.

In the first few minutes of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest masterpiece, Trap, as crowds file into a packed stadium for fictional pop icon Lady Raven’s concert, a tween fangirl named Riley explains some new slang to her loving girl dad, Cooper (Josh Harnett). “Crispy,” she says, is just a euphemism for “cool.” OK! Well, my humble review of this absurdist psychological thriller, which, for all intents and purposes, veers much closer to a comedy magic show, is certified crispy.

Trap‘s premise is fun and simple enough: A concert venue overrun with tweens and their parents turns out to be a, ahem, trap, for a local serial killer known as the Butcher. The entire venue is teeming with cops, with Dr. Josephine “The Profiler” Grant at their helm, ensuring no one gets in or out of the stadium until they apprehend this sicko. Predictably enough, it doesn’t take long for everything to go off the rails. Not a single character’s decision-making (except maybe Riley’s???) makes sense and we’re given almost zero explanation for most plot points… and for those reasons, I had the time of my life. There were moments where I pondered whether this movie was made in a lab to target—trap???—me, specifically, since I love all cinema where the characters behave entirely irrationally and zero effort is made to rationalize their behavior.

Then again, maybe my viewing experience was only as bonkers fun as it was because I en-Trap-ped some very fun people to watch it with me: Jezebel’s Kady Ruth Ashcraft and the AV Club’s Drew Gillis. From the moment a friend explained the premise of Trap to me while we were both inebriated, I knew that not only did I have to see it, but I had to see a film this surely rooted in chaos with a group.

Over the weekend, I sent a tweet begging quite literally anyone to watch Trap with me, and Kady Ruth and Drew happened to be the only respondents who seemed unlikely to be serial killers themselves. So, on a Monday night at an Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, we laughed, cried (JK), pumped our fists, and cheered in a theater packed with other adults doing the same. Frankly, everyone in the room was so locked in that the Butcher himself could’ve been among our ranks, and we’d be none the wiser. After taking about a day to process the movie, we reconvened over FaceTime on Tuesday afternoon to debrief. For your reading pleasure, Jezebel presents, every single thought we had while watching Trap.

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Kylie Cheung: Hello!

Kady Ruth Ashcraft: Hello, hello.

Drew Gillis: Hi. [crackling sound]

KC: Hold on, there’s a weird sound from you Drew. 

KRA: It’s like a crackling sound.

KC: It’s kind of “crispy,” but a little too crispy… Oh no. He got Trap-ped.

DG: Is that better?

KC: Yeah. How much did you guys read or know about the movie before watching it?

KRA: Very little. I was convinced by the trailer alone.

DG: I didn’t, we’d covered it a bit at AV Club, so I knew the basic premise, but I didn’t really seek out additional information.

KC: I had no idea what it was. I literally thought this was a Tom Cruise movie. And then someone told me, “This dad and daughter are trying to trap someone at a Taylor Swift concert,” and I was like, I need to watch that.

KRA: Just for the record, when you told me you thought Josh Hartnett was Tom Cruise—

KC: Do you see it at all? Does anyone see it?

KRA: No, as someone who’s solidly a millennial, I can’t really condone that. I’m sorry.

KC: Did you know this was my first M. Night movie? Is this par for the course for him?

KRA: I feel like it was sillier. A friend of mine read that he [Shyamalan] was laughing the entire time writing this script, which I love for him.

DG: This was also the first of his I’ve seen.

KC: If [Shyamalan] wasn’t laughing or if he was being very serious while writing this, would that make it more or less funny?

KRA: No, I think he knows what he’s doing. If you’re going to take on the Taylor Swift industrial complex, that has to be sort of cheeky. And I think he succeeded. But I think Lady Raven’s also very Olivia Rodrigo, more so than Taylor probably. I do think he could have had a little more fun with people’s obsession with pop stars. 

KC: There was that line where Cooper’s talking to M. Night and he’s like, “Oh, she could be a cult leader, huh?”

DG: There was a lot of Taylor Swift comparison, it didn’t feel like [the movie] was trying to imitate her all that much. I think she’s just really famous right now so people made that connection. That’s not what I’d imagine a Taylor Swift show to be like, aside from the people constantly getting tackled by police.

KRA: Yeah, the fact that it’s filled with cops…

KC: I didn’t want to read too much about it before we talked, but I was reading some tweets and I saw a lot of people agree with us that the best scene was when the trapdoor opens at the bottom of the stage, his daughter’s just vibing, having a good time, and unprompted, Cooper’s like, “Let’s go down there! Haven’t you always wanted to know what’s down there???”

KRA: Imagine being at your favorite artist’s concert having the time of your life and your dad is like, “Let’s check out the underground mechanical rooms of the building.”

DG: He wanted to be anywhere but that audience the entire concert. He was running off every five minutes.

KRA: How old do we think Riley was?

KC: My guess would be 14.

DG: Yeah, I was gonna say, not high school.

KRA: But the trapdoor, it felt like a failed Chekhov’s gun. I thought we were gonna get more from that, maybe he was gonna escape down there later. And the other thing about the trapdoor—there weren’t a lot of people guarding it, just this hole in the floor opened up that anyone could’ve walked through. But the popstar comes out of it, and it doesn’t have security or anything. All the girls were freaking out, but they were also very respectful—

KC: Not realistic at all.

KRA: 100%, and first of all, there’s this lack of assistants or security throughout.

KC: My feeling with the whole trapdoor thing was, it’s a preview of how out-of-pocket everything was about to get. None of it made sense.

KRA: We got to understand Cooper’s POV when we saw how excited he got about that trapdoor.

KC: Wait, wanna talk about Jody’s mom and stuff with the kids?

KRA: Yeah, there was a moment I thought the twist would be Jody’s mom was the Butcher. Because she said she had a dark side. And it was supposed to be a joke because Cooper’s the Butcher. It would have been a fun girlboss twist.

KC: I think it’s sweet that through it all, while he’s scared of getting caught or whatever, he still cared about fighting the mom of the mean girls to his daughter.

KRA: Well ultimately it’s that he hates moms, right? That’s what the whole movie is about. He hates his mom, he hated the Profiler. The movie’s anti-girl dad but it’s also anti mom.

DG: I like how there’s no attempt to justify his reasoning for anything, the closest we get is, he’ll look basically directly into the camera and give us a smile that indicates he’s crazy, and that’s all we need to know about any of his motivations at any point.

KC: Yeah, I wanted to ask about his facial expressions.

KRA: As someone who really grew up with a love of Josh Hartnett, to have that face thrown back in my face as an insane person was something I really had to reckon with.

DG: After we saw the trailer for the second Smile before the movie, it felt like we were watching that. 

KRA: Absolutely. We also can’t overlook when he took his shirt off at the end.

KC: Oh my god. What was that about? 

DG: It was to make him easier to tase.

KRA: But then, after they tased him, before they put handcuffs on him, they put his shirt back on, which was so kind, because then he was able to hide the bike spoke in his sleeve. It was really nice, they put his flannel back on him and buttoned it up.

KC: As he was taking off his shirt, I couldn’t stop laughing. Because, it was just the cherry on top of how there was no reason for 99% of the things everyone in this movie was doing. Like Drew said, the only real explanations are his facial expressions. 

KRA: I mean, he seemed like a legitimately good dad.

KC: What are the parenting tips you feel like you got from him? 

KRA: I feel like he really validated his daughter going through a difficult time of getting left out by Jody and the girls. It was cool bringing his daughter to the Lady Raven concert. He got her floor tickets. Didn’t try too hard to impress her, obviously still was doing his own thing, then goes,“Let’s go down the trapdoor,” but respected her when she was like, “No.”

KC: Yeah, he didn’t grab her and throw her in there.

KRA: What did you guys think of Lady Raven’s music?

DG: I thought she picked a very bizarre song to bring the “dreamer girl” on stage. Because, like all of her music, it was quite sultry but also quite bland.

KRA: Yeah, it was very mid-range, pop ballad. Not even a ballad, not quite a bop, just [singing] “We’re making moves, we’re in the club.”

DG: It was something like Jhene Aiko, but decidedly less adult. It definitely made sense kids would like it, but not that much.

KRA: I really think the movie should have stayed in the arena, and had a lot more fun with the mass chaos and sneaking through the back doors, underground rooms, and stuff.

KC: Did the concert look fun to you guys? 

DG: I like when the backup dancers had those mosquito net hats. That looked fun. That’s something they could have played with more, how people wear costumes to see Taylor Swift and stuff. There could’ve been more of that, or he could have disguised himself as a backup dancer.

KRA: Speaking of disguises, I felt that moment where he disguised himself as a fast food worker, but he had a knit sweater on underneath his apron, was so funny. 

DG: I’m trying to think of a show I’ve seen of that size. I saw Madonna at Barclays in December, and that was kind of giving that, but everyone there was old. I’m trying to put myself in the headspace of, “I’m trying to see Madonna but there’s a bunch of police here.”

KRA: I do think there’s an interesting commentary on the police state where you don’t go to events anymore without seeing a militarized presence, which I find incredibly unsettling. You’re like, “Oh my god, we’re having a fun pop star night,” then it’s machine gun, machine gun, machine gun. And police everywhere constantly taking every girl’s dad—no one was concerned. There’s never a child next to those men freaking out, the guy just goes with them.

DG: Why wouldn’t they just try to find the Butcher on the way in?

KC: I think because they think, “Oh, if we apprehend this guy, it might scare the real one way?”

KRA: They could have used plainclothes officers.

KC: I think you guys are better than the Profiler. She made serious mistakes you guys wouldn’t have made.

KRA: Wait, final word, do you think the movie was pro or anti-cop?

KC: I got a completely neutral feeling.

DG: I don’t think it was pro-cop. It didn’t prove them a very effective organization. 

KRA: It definitely wasn’t abolitionist.

KC: I think the Instagram Live, the way [Lady Raven] was able to organize and mobilize her fans, it was giving, “We take care of each other,” because they’re the ones who found Spencer and rescued him. Wait, do you guys think Lady Raven would be a gay icon?

DG: I don’t think so, I don’t think she’s good enough. One thing I noticed based on my personal experience of going to an Ariana Grande concert in 2019 is, if you go to a concert like that, there’s not going to be anyone in the men’s room. 

KRA: I was also thinking about that scene. There were so many guys in the men’s room.

KC: Speaking of Lady Raven, when the movie started, I really underestimated what her role was going to be. And then she ended up really stepping up. I just thought, what would Taylor Swift have done in this situation?

KRA: Well she wouldn’t have gone in the freaking limo without Tree Paine. There was no security for these pop stars!

DG: I want to get back to the Profiler. Every time she was on the screen, I had a big smile.

KC: Yeah, she was a gay icon. 

KRA: I started ironically fist-pumping, then, towards the end, when she shows up in the doorway at his house, that was a legitimate fist-pump I did. I was like, “The Profiler has arrived to kill the Butcher.”

KRA: Oh, another thing that’s interesting is, the wife whose name I can’t remember—in the first part, we don’t hear anything about a mom until she calls her mom to basically say, can I bring this internationally renowned popstar over, and the woman’s like, yeah, I’ll make deviled eggs.

DG: She’s like, let me just whip something up, and it’s two dozen deviled eggs.

KRA: The first three-quarters of the movie I was getting single dad vibes from Josh [Hartnett]. He’s scoring dad points for taking his daughter to this concert.

KC: Yeah, same. Wait, we should talk about girl dads and if they’ll ever recover from the reputational damage of this movie.

KRA: My vote is this was the nail in the coffin for girl dads. 

KC: Yeah, I think we were all getting pretty sick of their one-trick-pony business, like, you have a daughter. OK.

KRA: We were lured into the girl dad appeal, and then he ended up being a serial killer.

DG: Well, under-discussed elephant in the room, his girl dad was the result of a boy mom.

KRA: Drew, you’re a genius.

KC: Wow.

KRA: So the phantom mirages he kept having of his mother, she popped up in the very beginning and at the end, which breaks the rule of threes. It just wasn’t enough for me to go, “Oh, she’s a big part of his psychological damage,” or whatever.

DG: Yeah, it’s like, “Oh, he’s crazy because his parents.” Well, obviously. That’s how it works. 

KC: What did she even do to him?

DG: She was just a little withholding.

KRA: Like, OK, he was raised in Catholicism. Also, speaking of the girl dad dynamic—again, Lady Raven is the girl to [Shyamalan’s] dad. 

KC: Was he trying to say something?

DG: I mean, casting his daughter in a narrative like this, he has to know people are going to read it as some kind of thing on their relationship, that’s how I’d do it if I was doing a study of this director. Then it’s like, well what is his relationship with his mom? What is he working through right now?

KRA: And they live in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I looked up his Architectural Digest tour this morning. 

KC: What did you find?

KRA: He lives in a neighborhood called Ravenswood, it’s like a Georgian castle or estate, now renovated.

KC: Speaking of being in a house, I want to go to Lady Raven’s Instagram Live from the bathroom.

KRA: Yes. So to set the scene, she has three phones in her possession, she has Cooper’s, her phone, and Riley’s phone. There was some poor editing that didn’t make that immediately clear. 

KC: What did you think of the comments on the Instagram Live?

KRA: Realistic.

DG: I don’t want to nitpick the logic of the whole movie because that’s not much fun, but if I was in that situation, I would’ve thrown his phone in the toilet, if it could kill this random guy, get rid of it. Don’t just give it back.

KC: I guess she’s in panic mode.

KRA: Also, there’s a window behind her the whole time, she had an Ariana Grande build, tiny girl—she could’ve slipped out of that window. That family of three slipped out of the window.

DG: I think you also question his mental state, because it was him banging on the door for the entire time she’s on Instagram Live, and then he just unlocked it with the key when she was done.

KRA: Also, that she just texted her limo driver, “call the cops”—she could’ve called the cops. 

KC: At first I was chalking it up to, maybe she doesn’t trust the cops or she’s some kind of abolitionist. 

KRA: No, the entire concert is the cops, she is an extension of the police state.

KC: If there’s one time I call the cops, it probably would’ve been this.

DG: And the cops are so useless. I wouldn’t call it a pro-cop movie because of that, but also, it’s because this one guy is just a genius with supernatural abilities to disappear and stuff, it’s not pointing out their flaws.

KC: I really enjoyed that everyone was laughing in the theater the whole time. Do you remember when the theater was the loudest? The trapdoor scene, for sure.

KRA: Drew, I remember when we were walking to the train, you said something like, there’s no subtext, every single thing in this movie is said aloud. I feel like that had a lot of laughs. You’d just see a door with all the cops and Cooper would be all, I need to go through the door and pass by the cops. 

DG: It was also bizarre they kept bringing girls backstage because they kept fainting, which was never addressed.

KRA: I guess the girls were just like, getting dehydrated or were drunk. It did seem weird that the medical tent was backstage. They definitely needed a whole triage center, between the explosion and Cooper pushing a girl down the stairs. That got a laugh too.

DG: Yeah, him pushing the girl down the stairs, I thought they were setting something up, like, “Oh, he can’t stop killing, he’s a monster.” I don’t know why he did that, it didn’t come up again.

KC: Yeah, I thought he was gonna kill people at the concert.

KRA: That’s what I was wishing would happen.

DG: I do appreciate how random everything was, that’s just real life.

KRA: I also felt like him just kind of charming his way out of everything was also real life. The nurse was like, “We love this guy,” the shirt vendor was like, “Come on down, I never see fathers as good as you.” I do think that’s a serial killer or politician.

DG: Kid Cudi also wanted him.

KC: Everyone said, “We love Josh Hartnett.”

KRA: The whole time, I was waiting for there maybe to be a twist where he wasn’t the Butcher, but the charming everyone got me on board.

KC: Stupid question, but what was he scared of in terms of passing through police to exit? Did he think they were gonna collect his DNA? 

KRA: Yeah, what are they doing to the guys they have other than making them strip down? They had [Cooper’s] tattoo I guess.

DG: I think they said he fit a profile, they had the most bizarre info on him—what color car he drove, bottom half of a paper receipt for the concert, but not enough for them to catch him.

KRA: Obviously a lot of airtime was given to him being a bad dad for the whole plot, but the mom wasn’t great either. Her kids learned their dad was a serial killer and then she’s like, “OK, go stay at Auntie’s, I’m gonna have a nice night at home finishing these deviled eggs.”

DG: So the twist is that she knew he was the Butcher, so why would you send your daughter with him?

KRA: She’s not a good mom. Girl moms, also bad.

KC: Parents suck. Is that the movie?

KRA: Yeah, Trap is anti-parents—more like Parent Trap.

KC: Sorry to keep saying, “Oh, this tweet I saw,” but this tweet I saw said, “The final part of the movie was the best part.” I think the first two thirds are critically good, and the last is objectively trash but camp fun. What did you think?

DG: Everything after he escapes the limo, I started to have a hard time.

KC: That was a turning point, yeah.

KRA: The part where the cop looked in and just saw his pile of clothes and was like, “He must have escaped,” like… yeah…

KC: I just find it hard to believe he wouldn’t have been able to escape the concert arena if he could escape all these other situations.

DG: I do think it showed absurdity, and it’s also saying, “There’s no way out of this. This guy’s gonna keep doing this, and there’s nothing the police can do to stop him.” Oh, circling back to the biggest laugh, I think it was when [Spencer] got pulled into the van, the kidnapped guy.

KC: Oh my god, yeah.

KRA: Was that intentional? Not to victim-blame, but… he just walked in there. 

KC: I’ll barely get into a van if that’s my Uber.

DG: Yeah, and he’s what, a 22-year-old agriculture student?

KC: What other venue or event would you like to see a Trap movie if there’s a sequel?

KRA: I think at a big NFL game, you’d be dealing with a false sense of machismo that could be interesting. Like [Trap] relied on the idea of teen girls being so wrapped up in the show, being “helpless,” except for Lady Raven, who ultimately did not make good decisions.

KC: I think a Sixers game, my favorite NBA team, would be fun. No further explanation neccessary.

DG: I think this is the best setting for this kind of thing, but maybe a Hollywood awards show, something televised would be interesting.

KC: OK, Letterboxd rating for this movie?

DG: I gave it a three and a heart.

KC: Aww.

DG: I did like it. I did have a really good time watching it. 

KRA: My friends Derek and Emily have a rating system of “Did you like it? Did you like watching it? Did you think it was good?” Matt [KRA’s partner] said yes, yes, no. You can have fun watching and it’s not good. And I think that’s an important distinction.

DG: I don’t think it was “so bad it’s good”—

KC: It wasn’t like Madame Web.

DG: I think it was great at what it was doing. People like to see bad movies, but most often when movies are bad, they’re boring, and this was never boring.

KC: I give it five stars, movie of the year. It was objectively good. And then it had some moments that were so bad it’s good.

KRA: It felt like some of the actors were in different movies. It felt like Cooper and the t-shirt guy were in the same movie. It felt like the Profiler was in a different movie, Riley was in a different movie.

DG: The Profiler felt like if Lisa Vanderpump was trying to play Judy Dench.

KRA: Yeah, the Profiler was incredible.

KC: Well, I think that’s all I’ve got. You guys?

KRA: Yeah.

DG: Yeah.