Trap is a 2024 psychological thriller written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, starring Josh Hartnett as Cooper Adams, a devoted father who brings his teenage daughter Riley to a pop concert by the global superstar Lady Raven. The catch, which the film reveals in its opening minutes rather than holding as a twist: Cooper is a prolific serial killer known as The Butcher, and the authorities have surrounded the concert venue with thousands of undercover officers, having been tipped that The Butcher would be in attendance. The film then becomes a single-location pressure cooker as Cooper tries to get himself and his daughter out while the net closes around him.

Shyamalan's decision to immediately disclose the premise — there is no pretense that Cooper is an ordinary father — allows the film to operate in a register of sustained dramatic irony that is unusual for the thriller genre. The audience knows everything Cooper knows; the suspense derives not from information gaps but from the claustrophobic specificity of watching a brilliant, methodical killer improvise his way through an escalating crisis. Josh Hartnett, whose Oppenheimer appearance revived wide audience interest in his work, is revelatory — charming, unsettling, and utterly committed to a character who cannot be quite called a protagonist and cannot quite be called a villain in the conventional sense.

Shyamalan's daughter Saleka plays Lady Raven onscreen, performing original music composed for the film, and the concert sequences have a genuine pop spectacle energy that creates tonal dissonance with the violence simmering beneath them. Trap is not Shyamalan at his most formally innovative, but it is arguably his most purely entertaining film since Split — a tightly engineered genre machine that delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more, sustaining an almost unbearable level of tension across its entire runtime. It streams on Max.