Trap has daddy issues—but how gay is it?

Welcome to How Gay Is It? Out's review series where, using our state-of-the-art Eggplant Rating System, we determine just how queer some of pop culture's buzziest films and TV shows are! (Editor's note: this post contains spoilers for Warner Bros' Trap.)

M. Night Shyamalan is back with Trap and it’s being billed as an "experience" — but that doesn't mean it's a good one. The writer/director/producer sets his latest film at a concert for Lady Raven (played by... his real life daughter Saleka Shyamalan). Josh Hartnett stars as an infamous serial killer, "The Butcher," who is in attendance with his teenage daughter.

As we find out (literally from the previews) the entire concert is actually an elaborate operation to try to catch Hartnett. We won’t lie, when we saw the trailer, we thought the conceit of a one location escape film had potential. What we were confronted with on screen however, was somewhere in that danger zone between camp and trash...

In some senses we have to give Shyamalan the most credit, he imprisons you as an audience member into having to watch his daughter perform some R&B-ish tunes paired with far away shots of a watered down bobo version of Taylor Swift's stage show. Saleka's music is not terrible, it's just not anywhere near the level of the pop-girlies her character is meant to evoke. It's a nepo-baby trap film, we're just living in it.

As for the on-screen father-daughter relationship between Hartnett’s Cooper and his daughter Riley (played by Ariel Donoghue), we found ourselves absolutely befuddled. Cooper speaks to Riley as if she's eight years old, not the relatively coherent teen she is. This is only exacerbated as Cooper finds out about the subterfuge laid out for him at the show (again, revealed to us in the trailers), and tries to drag Riley along.

Cooper's dialogue and the entire film is a perfect example of a director not trusting their audience in the slightest. Everything is exposition overload, and it feels like M. Night thinks HE is speaking to an audience of eight year olds who must have every detail spoon fed to him. Also, some plot points make no sense and occur off screen in a way that, of course, we have to be overtly delivered specifics.

Spoilers about to ensue: We were lured in with the trailer (that again, gave away the best parts, can you tell we're peeved?), but the film abandons that premise to… make Saleka's Lady Raven an unexpected hero? There is a point where the collision of her and The Butcher character starts to raise stakes, but then it devolves into next level absurdity as we go on a thriller combined with a disaster family therapy session. These parts are where the camp flirts with the surface, and almost could turn the film into a cult classic — but it never gets there.

We're teased with bizarre details the whole time about The Butcher's motivations, but of all the things M. Night chooses NOT to reveal to us, Cooper's MO and history end up not being amongst them. At least not in an elegant way. Trap is full of potentially decent premises constantly sabotaged by Shyamalan’s dialogue and plot holes. We'll be generous and say he's doing this all for the love of his daughter, but putting her at the forefront comes at the expense of the film itself.

Warner Bros.

Now the question that we at Out are always trying to deduce: How gay is it?! Off-brand pop-girlie wannabe gay. The character of Lady Raven is clearly modeled on our current wave of iconic musicians. Yet much like the rest of the film, she is at best a pastiche of the real deal. This would be passable for the purposes of the film if we weren't hyper aware that he's legitimately trying to elevate Saleka as an artist. There's a Kid Cudi cameo in the film that reeks of "do me a favor" ness that continues to distract from any semblance of a thriller.

Her intro early on has her referring to her audience as "kings and queens," but that's as close as we get to anything resembling an understanding of the culture who would probably be Lady Raven's core fanbase. The rest is about as straight as the plot (major spoilers, but sorry for anyone coming to this looking for a twist).

As an "experience," Trap is not one we care to repeat, so we give it a 2 out of 5 stars. As for our patented Eggplant Rating System, we'll give it a 0 out of 5.

Trap is now playing in theaters.