If you were to time travel back a decade and tell the average moviegoer that a new thriller from suspense auteur M. Night Shyamalan was about to debut in the peak of summer blockbuster season and that cinephiles would seem genuinely amped for it, you'd likely be met with some serious side-eye. But here in 2024, there's a strong possibility that Trap will be another in a recent string of non-fiascos for Shyamalan, a man who has one of the most unique career arcs of any movie director.
The wild extremes of Shyamalan's career map almost perfectly to a parabolic curve. He hit the mainstream seemingly out of nowhere 25 years ago with the 1999 mega-hit The Sixth Sense. But even his origin narrative was incorrect, as he'd been in the business, with little success (excepting the screenplay for the family film Stuart Little), since the early '90s. His saturnine breakthrough ghost story, with its infamous twist ending in the tradition of O Henry, was not just a cultural sensation — the second-highest-grossing film domestically in an all-time great movie year — it was also a critical smash, nominated for multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
The Shyamalan hype was at such a fever pitch, Newsweek even anointed him "The New Spielberg" in a cover story. He stayed on a box office hot streak with his unique spins on superhero and alien invasion flicks with 2000's Unbreakable and 2002's Signs.
But the cracks in his twist-forward formula started to show with 2004's The Village. It's for the best that almost no one has seen The Buried Secrets of M. Night Shyamalan, a three-hour "documentary" framed as a look at the making of that period puritan horror film. In a fantastic show of hubris, Secrets morphs from a supposedly candid look at tyrannical onset behavior into an investigation of the (entirely fabricated) secret origin of Shyamalan. The tone-deaf shame even claims that as a child, he fell into a freezing lake and was dead for 35 minutes, and upon being revived he found he had the ability to commune with the spirit world. Riiiight.
You could say that self-mythologizing Shyamalan found himself in a metaphorical trap of his own making in hopes of replicating the runaway success of The Sixth Sense. These circumscriptions necessitated that he rely on narrative sleight of hand, with a last-minute revelation that recontextualized everything that preceded it. He and his habitual twists became a punchline. "From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan" elicited laughter among crowds when projected on the big screen during trailers.
Between 2004 and 2014 he made six films, none of which crested above a 50% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It appeared that he would be another director hailed early as a genius who lost their ability to measure up to viewers' high expectations.
Then in 2015, Shyamalan rose from the ashes with the found footage horror cheapie The Visit... and every film since then has crossed over that 50% audience threshold on RT. To put the nadir of Shyamalan's career in perspective, he literally had to mortgage his house to finance The Visit. But it landed at just the right moment: The found-footage subgenre was still in full bloom, and it began a partnership with the incredibly successful and budget-conscious horror studio Blumhouse Productions.
Shyamalan followed up The Visit with a run of movies that, while not universally critically esteemed or smash hits, were all solid earners and unmistakably the products of his singular vision. He used his reclaimed clout to finally finish the deconstructionist comic book Unbreakable saga with Split and Glass, as well as make Old (which boasts some of his most artful staging) and Knock at the Cabin, his first adapted screenplay since the disastrous Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Unlike the unchecked ambition of Shyamalan's biggest flops, his five comeback films have all been chamber pieces primarily unfolding in one location. And as far as his trademark narrative curveballs? They are still in play, albeit with a much more favorable hit-to-miss ratio than in the first two-thirds of his career. The stripped-back approach has seemingly worked for Shyamalan, and it is one that he seems to embrace in his latest feature.
Trap stars Josh Hartnett (no stranger to career reclamations himself) as a single father mired in a serial killer sting operation while attending a pop concert with his teenage daughter. Some eyebrows were raised when the first trailer dropped and apparently revealed the movie's twist outright, but this might just be an appetite-whetting red herring from the ever-mischievous director. We'll see if the somewhat-humbled Shyamalan of the later aughts' revised recipe for cinematic thrills will continue to satisfy the audiences he'd spectacularly lost before eventually winning back. But as with all things Shyamalan, the outcome is always unpredictable. ♦
Trap opens in theaters on Aug. 2.
