CRITICS

Alison Willmore on Trap... Jackson McHenry on Life and Trust... Kathryn VanArendonk on Joe Rogan's Burn the Boats.

-  Kathryn VanArendonk

EARLY ON IN M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, Josh Hartnett’s character makes a trip to the bathroom as an excuse to hide in a stall and pull up the webcam he has pointed at his latest victim, a young man who’s been chained up in what looks like a basement. Hartnett plays Cooper Adams, a Philadelphia-area firefighter who, unbeknownst to his wife and kids, is a prolific murderer nicknamed “the Butcher” because he carves his targets into pieces before dumping them. The camera lingers on Cooper for a few beats before showing us what’s on his screen, and the expression on Hartnett’s face is genuinely spectacular. There’s speculation there, as well as a restrained anticipation, but more than anything, he looks like a display glitching out and revealing the operating system it’s been running on—muscles mis firing, eyes dead. Cooper has brought his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see her favorite pop star perform, an event that threatens to expose his secret life when it turns out that law enforcement is using the concert to smoke out the criminal who’s been terrorizing the city.