I might just be dumb but I genuinely enjoyed 'Trap'

I actually saw this at an early screening so it was before any of the reviews had come out, and having been all over the board with M Night, I never really know what to expect, but the concept for this one was more interesting to me than either of the last two movies he's made, so I was at least curious to check it out.

As far as the 'believability' of it, I was a little surprised how many people seemed to just totally be in shock that M Night would make a film with a ridiculous concept, given that he also made a movie about a beach that makes you old, meaning I wasn't exactly holding out for stark realism. I admit, it is an absurd premise, but when the movie is being pitched as 'Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert', I'm not going into it expecting anything other than entertaining schlock, which is exactly what I got. It feels like a slightly shitty De Palma movie, but I'll take a flawed, original concept over fucking Venom 3 or Red One any day.

The main reason this works at all, for me at least, is Josh Hartnett. M Night movies live or die on their characters, and while this is nowhere near Bruce Willis in Unbreakable or James McAvoy in Split, I still thought he really understood exactly what he needed to bring, and the fact that it was contextualized as 'an obsessive serial killer in a highly tense situation having to feign normalcy' made the signature weird Shyamalan dialogue make a lot more sense, especially when the daughter would call him out on sounding weird.

His performance (and the film in general) has been compared to the Hitman games, and I think that's pretty apt. It's also a movie where the overall quality of the production combined with the ridiculousness helps make it feel like 'polished/"elevated" schlock', which studios aren't really making a lot of anymore, for better or for worse.

After rewatching it on streaming the other night just to see if anything had changed from the early version I saw (it hadn't), I can definitely admit the hype of being at a screening gave me a bit of a rose-tinted view of it the first time, but in general I still thought it was a fun movie with more self awareness than Shyamalan usually has, and had enough fun with its concept that I was a little bummed when it seemed like most people really weren't digging it, at least at first. Curious how y'all felt about this one.