Why M. Night Shyamalan's killer thriller 'Trap' is really a dad movie

When his daughters were growing up, M. Night Shyamalan was the “cool dad.”

Not because of his genre-mashing movies that rocked pop culture, gems like “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable” and “Signs” – though they were awfully cool. No, Shyamalan was a great concert buddy: His oldest daughter Saleka, now a R&B pop singer, remembers going with him to her first concert, to see Beyoncé in Philadelphia, when she was 10. “That was like a huge core memory for me,” she says.

The first show that comes to Shyamalan’s mind is taking his girls to see Adele “before she kind of blew up,” he says. “Sharing the music and art that I love with the kids is a big deal in our household.”

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A father and his daughter take in a high-profile concert in Shyamalan’s latest film, but it’s memorable for a whole other reason: In the thriller “Trap” (in theaters Friday), Cooper (Josh Hartnett) accompanies his teen Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see mega pop star Lady Raven (played by Saleka). The twist here is that Cooper is also an elusive serial killer known as “The Butcher,” and he figures out that the FBI and local law enforcement know he’s there, turning the arena into a trap to take him down.

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“It's kind of a daddy-daughter rite of passage to go to a pop concert,” Shyamalan says. “So it's like the birthday party in ‘Signs,’ something that's supposed to be very happy where something dark happens.”

With a killer Josh Hartnett, 'Trap' taps into fatherhood themes

Themes of fatherhood and parenthood run through the filmmaker’s works: The two dads and their daughter facing an apocalyptic choice in “Knock at the Cabin,” for example, or adults isolating their children from a dangerous world in “The Village.”

“They're all kind of urban nightmares, this sense of something threatening the sanctity of the family,” Shyamalan says. “I guess that's just the underlying fear for me, so most of my movies have that at the center.”

But “Trap,” in which the killer dad tries to connect with his maturing daughter while also trying to avoid law enforcement actively pursuing him, feels personal because of where the 53-year-old director is in his life.

“Probably a little bit of it is the girls have become adults and I feel that I'm losing them, their childhood. Our relationship is beautiful as it's transforming, but the baby girl and the father that they look up to, that part is going away,” explains Shyamalan, who has three daughters – Saleka, 28, Ishana, 24, and Shivani, 19 – with wife Bhavna Vaswani. “Now, there's kind of mutuality, as they see me as more complex and they become aware of things in life and all of that stuff. So maybe it's the fear of losing your little girl and that they're going to see you differently – this balance of who you are as a person vsersus how you know yourself as a dad.”

'Atypical' serial killer movie wraps up a very Shyamalan summer

The perspective of “Trap” gradually shifts from Cooper to Lady Raven, who each represent a “different thesis about the way to exist,” he says. (Cooper's is "compartmentalization to an extreme level" while Lady Raven is "connected to everybody.") Another way Shyamalan wanted "Trap" to be “atypical” in a crowded niche of serial killer movies and TV shows: He cast Hayley Mills as a dogged FBI profiler, a far cry from her days of “Pollyanna” and “The Parent Trap.” 

“I thought, rather than a guy hunting a guy, could it be a maternal figure who’s hunting these guys, is really good at reading their thoughts and anticipating what they're going to do next?” Shyamalan says. “So it just added the kaleidoscope nature of being at this concert, but there's this little elderly lady who's hunting him down and who's buoyant and as smart as him and is having as much fun as him.”

While Shyamalan’s last two films, “Old” and “Knock at the Cabin,” were adaptations, “Trap” marks a return to the sort of original tales that put him on the map. “It was a big deal,” he says. “I didn't realize how much I missed it, that I wasn't trying to honor or interpret what someone else had written.” It’s also the end of a remarkable summer for his family: He produced his daughter Ishana’s directorial feature debut “The Watchers,” and “Trap” stars Saleka plus features 14 of her songs.

“My wife would be like, 'When are we taking a break?' ” he quips. “Although I started writing my new one, so don't tell her that.”