Trap continues M. Night Shyamalan’s best qualities, placing genuine emotion atop a pulpy, b-movie premise.
This article contains light spoilers for Trap.
Its no spoiler to say thatM.
Night Shyamalanmakes a cameo appearance in his latest movieTrap.
After all, Shyamalan shows up in all of his movies, a tribute to his heroAlfred Hitchcock.
For evidence, look no further thanTrap.
These base pleasures carryTrapthrough even when the tension fades.
Its a trick that Shyamalan has relied upon throughout his career.
The Slop Sense
Ask most people what they remember aboutThe Sixth Sense.
Those scenes stick in our heads for good reason.
Shyamalan crafts them for maximum effect, overriding even the rules established earlier in the film.
Even when not dealing with such icky material, Shyamalan still directed scare scenes for ultimate creepiness.
The shot of an alien walking out from behind a wall remains the standout moment inSigns.
traumatizing to an entire generation of young moviegoers in the early 2000s.
Its not just the blood and guts that define Shyamalans work during his first successful phase.
But no one could defend him through his two worst movies,The Last AirbenderandAfter Earth.
All of these films went wrong in more or less the same way.
They got the balance wrong.
The problem gets worse inThe Happening,The Last Airbender, andAfter Earth.
But none of those work because Shyamalan downplays the gross stuff for the sake of high ideals.
The most dumbfounding of these remainsThe Happening, which should work as pulp.
As the first half of his career shows, Shyamalan works when he gets away from big ideas.
But he can never get away from the pulp.
In fact, he shouldnt get away from the pulp because thats where he works best.
And thats how M. Night Shyamalan relaunched his career.
However, the pathos works with the outrageous stuff instead of against it.
In his best later movies Shyamalan remembers that hes a pulp director first.
Trap is now playing in theaters.
