Trap feels like a Shyamalan film through and through – for better and for worse

It must be tough promoting an M. Night Shyamalan film. Revealing too much in the first trailer for a film like Falland it hinders the audience’s experience of the movie. Revealing too little, and there is no clear hook for the audience to even enter the theater. And then there is the tightrope that the director himself has to walk to unfold the story: Fall is about a serial killer named Cooper (Josh Hartnett), who goes to a pop concert with his daughter, only to discover that the event is an elaborate — wait for it — trap to catch him.

This is all revealed in the trailer and within the first 30 minutes of the film. In a different, perhaps better version of this film, that early reveal would have been disastrous – and undermined the effectiveness of a major plot twist. As the film stands – a fun but half-hearted execution of a killer concept that relies more on sentiment than suspense – it’s just a bit of a shame to find out so soon.

Fall let us fall in media reswith father and daughter on their way to a concert. The trap is already set and the players are all moving. Cooper walks into it, distracted by his daughter’s excitement and the duty he feels as a father. Let me take this moment to say: the sooner you banish any rational thought about how illogical a law enforcement-plan-a-concert-trap is, the better! As a movie, Fall isn’t so interested in convincing the viewer how this might work logistically; that’s not really what Shyamalan’s film is about, and while it’s sometimes distractingly bad, it’s also sometimes delightfully funny. Instead, the focus, at least initially, remains mostly tight: on Cooper, his relationship with daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue, the film’s sentimental heart), and how difficult it can be to balance serial murder with parenthood. The struggle!

Much of the film’s execution rests on Harnett’s capable shoulders, a former teenage heartthrob who has had memorable recent roles in eclectic projects like Penny terrible, OppenheimerAnd The bearHartnett is convincing as both father-daughter firefighter Cooper and maniacally focused serial killer The Butcher. He’s clearly enjoying himself, and his likability is the most compelling weapon in his arsenal of evasion. Here, Hartnett’s boyish good looks (even in his 40s) work to his advantage; they’re smoothed out to something slightly more relatable, which helps Shyamalan’s exploration of cultural assumptions, as Cooper uses his all-American (read: white) family man status to avoid the trap. It’s enough to make you wish the film had played around with Cooper’s serial murder revelation a little longer, playing with our own assumptions about who’s allowed to be a good movie guy and who isn’t. Unfortunately, it’s hard to be an M. Night Shyamalan film.

The staging of the film’s concert setting, a production in itself, is also impressive. As someone who’s been to a lot of arena shows filled with screaming fans in recent years, most of this felt perfect (except maybe how many people got out of their seats and wandered through the concessions area for the duration of the show). It’s all held together by Saleka, a real-life R&B artist and Shyamalan’s daughter, who plays fictional pop star Lady Raven. The most successful effort Fall does a great job of convincing viewers that this is a real concert, and in many ways this film works better as a showcase for Saleka’s skills as a songwriter and performer than as a suspense thriller. There’s a fan-like authenticity to how Riley, Cooper’s teenage daughter, is obsessed with Lady Raven, and how she and all the other concert-going extras know every word to every song.

Perhaps that’s partly because the film itself sometimes feels like a multimillion-dollar showcase of a father to his daughter (Shyamalan puts all other fake dads to shame), Fall‘s highest stakes come in Cooper’s relationship with his own daughter. The film doesn’t imply that Cooper’s joy at witnessing his daughter’s joy at the Lady Raven concert is anything less than 100% genuine, or that he isn’t genuinely involved in the machinations of teenage girls who have led Riley to the edge of the truth with her group of friends. He’s a serial killer who delights in dismembering innocent people, but he’s also a damn good dad! Fall ultimately gets too distracted by half-hearted explorations of other subjects — like Cooper’s relationship with his absent mother, or the career of profiler Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills) — to really wreak havoc on us with those themes. Overall, Fall reminded me of a serial killer tv series you or Hannibalbut as a film had much less time to artfully deal with the dissonant tonal shifts that a story with a murderous protagonist dictates.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

But there are moments when that central plotline sings. In one particularly effective scene, Cooper watches from the sidelines as his daughter gets a chance to dance onstage. He stares at her joy, the lights of the performance illuminating his smile. We’ve seen this character use his grin to get away with it time and time again, but there’s nothing calculated about his emotions here. The film lingers, living in this moment when everyone seems happy, and allowing the crushing potential of the fall apart to grow. “Your daughter will remember this day for the rest of her life,” a well-meaning publicist tells Cooper. The audience, and Cooper, are left with the dramatic irony of the statement, wondering how exactly the prophecy will come to pass.

Within the Shyamalan pantheon, Fall tends more towards the superficial tension of Old or the campy pleasures of The event then the raw, tense cruelty of Split. It’s got a little too much on its plate and a little too much heart to be a pure thrill ride, and it’s worth adjusting your expectations accordingly. Whatever Fall Perhaps it’s a Shyamalan film through and through — ambitious in its original concept, derivative in its thematic exploration, and exultant in its own twists. Twenty-five years later The Sixth Sense was the first to blow our socks off, at a time when every other advertisement for the Summer Olympics touting the “creative” power of AIThere’s something incredibly precious about a director who gets to make the movies he wants to make. Even when a Shyamalan film doesn’t trip us up as it pulls the ground out from under our feet, there’s something ever sweeter about the very human way they try.

Fall is now in theaters.