M Night Shyamalan‘s new thriller Trap has received mixed reviews, with some critics calling the plot “farfetched” and “contrived”.
The director’s latest film sees (Josh Hartnett) and his teenage daughter (Ariel Donoghue) attend pop concert together, only for the dad to learn that the whole event has been set up to catch a known serial killer.
What his daughter doesn’t realise, though, is that the serial killer in question is her father.
At the time of writing, Trap currently has a score 50 per cent on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
In a mixed review, The Hollywood Reporter called it “a moderately entertaining thriller” but noted it “struggles to maintain momentum”. The outlet added: “By the end of the second act and well into the third, Trap, although stylishly directed, can’t help but lose some of its edge.”
Variety, meanwhile, stated that each of the film’s twists are “more contrived than the last,” adding: “Asking an audience to go with something that is this fundamentally farfetched borders on an insult. More to the point: It’s not fun.”
Elsewhere, Collider said the film showcases “glimpses of [Shyamalan’s] former brilliance but ultimately falters with awkward choices and laughable moments.”
In a more positive write-up, The Wrap described it as one of Shyamalan’s “best thrillers”, but added that it “doesn’t have the depth of his most important films or the theatricality of his most memorably weird experiments”.
Meanwhile, The Daily Beast praised Hartnett’s performance, writing: “As a pulpy game of cat-and-mouse, however, it provides enough thrills to compensate for its illogicalities, and in Josh Harnett, it boasts a star adept at locating the fiendishness in fatherhood.”
In a recent interview with Empire magazine, Shyamalan said he pitched the film as a cross between The Silence of The Lambs and a Taylor Swift concert – a concept he previously described to NME as “very unusual“.
Trap is out in the US now, but will be released in the UK on 9 August.