It’s amazing how much watching Glass, M. Night Shyamalan’s masterwork from 2019, changed my perspective on the author almost immediately. I used to think the same thing as everyone else: he made some excellent movies in the beginning, but his later work has been subpar. I’m not ready to declare After Earth and The Last Airbender to be masterpieces—far from it. But after watching Glass for the first time, I realized something and began to evaluate Shyamalan’s body of work differently—focusing more on thematic and visual storytelling than on narrative and language. I was so struck by the film’s terrible conclusion because of the way director Shyamalan and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis obstructed the camera to depict the limitations its protagonists were living under on a daily basis. It was as if I had a complete epiphany and realized that my perception of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies was wrong.
Since he started funding his own productions, he has also been more harsher on himself. This is because he nearly went to director’s prison with After Earth. The self-referential “cookbook that will change the world” cameo has passed, and we find ourselves in a radically different aesthetic and reflexive phase than the director was even a decade ago. With his most recent film, Trap, Shyamalan exhibits his most self-deprecating and cynical qualities. He makes fun of the career decisions that drove him away from his family and laments the time he lost spent with them. To make up for this, he fully incorporates his daughter Saleka into the creative process.Yes, the main character of the film is serial killer Cooper (Josh Hartnett), who goes to a Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) concert with his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue). He has no idea that the FBI has discovered he will be present and has set up a trap to capture him. The majority of the film is structured in a traditional cat-and-mouse manner, with Cooper in total command of the circumstances and always one step ahead of the FBI’s operation under the direction of Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills). But when Lady Raven talks about how her father abandoned her when she was very young and left her to care for herself, things starts to click.
And who allows his daughter complete backstage access? In a metatextual cameo, Shyamalan himself plays “her uncle, her mother’s brother.” (As though we were unaware of uncle’s meaning). At that point, it became clear to me that Trap was about something far more significant and intimate for Shyamalan than the cat-and-mouse game between Cooper and the FBI. He gradually reveals that his decision to prioritize making movies over his family had a negative impact on his life. As a result, he is now actively involved in his children’s professional decisions, whether it be by producing her daughter Ishana’s directorial debut, The Watchers, or casting Saleka as Lady Raven, which allowed her to compose an entire soundtrack for the film.