Let’s Talk About the Ending, and End Credits, of Trap

If a new M. Night Shyamalan movie is now in theaters, you know we want to talk about some spoilers. So let’s do just that for Trap, starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, and Saleka Shyamalan.

Though Trap has many twists and turns during the film, it doesn’t really have one of those big shocking Shyamalan twists. Or… does it? For our money, the biggest reveal in the film isn’t that Cooper (Harnett) and Riley (Donoghue) escape the concert in Lady Raven’s (Shyamalan) limo. It isn’t even everything that happens once they get back to her home. It’s the moment after Cooper has escaped again, comes back, and learns it was his wife (Alison Pill) who planted the Lady Raven ticket receipt in one of his hideouts. Despite everything she said just a few scenes earlier, she did in fact have a gut feeling her husband was the Butcher and she was going find out for sure, with a little help from law enforcement.

Is that a Shyamalan twist though? It’s certainly unexpected and satisfying, turning a fun cat-and-mouse thriller on its head with a strong message about a woman’s intuition. It also, in a way, turns the film on its head knowing Riley’s mom, and Cooper’s wife, is the one indirectly responsible for everything that happens in the movie. And don’t forget the fact Pill is in the movie at all was kept out of the trailers because it would reveal the others get out of the concert. So on those bases, maybe it is a Shyamalan twist, just on a lesser level. Either way, it’s a fun, surprising reveal.

There’s then the very end of the film where Cooper has been captured, hugs his son, and gets into the armored car. We then realize he stole a spoke off his son’s bicycle and will, at some point, attempt another escape. It’s an interesting, open-ended note to leave the movie on, but I’m not sure if it worked. The whole movie has been a tight-rope act for the audience. Do we want to see him captured or do we want to see him escape? And, in the end, you would hope Shyamalan would come down on one side or the other. Instead, by keeping that going and letting us interpret if he’s going to escape again or not, the film loses some of its potential impact. I wasn’t a fan of that moment.

I was, however, a huge fan of the film’s mid-credit sequence. We circle back to the vendor (Jonathan Langdon) who told Cooper about the trap in the first place. Who also gave him the secret code word, had his badge stolen, and basically screwed everything up. He’s watching TV and hears the Butcher has been captured, and we watch as he realizes that Cooper was the Butcher and he helped the Butcher escape. He’s in shock.

That moment, while kind of secondary to the plot, is fantastic and leaves you feeling something at the end. Plus, it wasn’t even in Shyamalan’s original plans. “That wasn’t in the script,” he told io9. “I went, ‘Wow, you know what? I’m just gonna shoot it.’ And I was like, ‘Start doing it, let’s get it ready. I’ll shoot it whenever I have an hour or two and let’s go do it.’”

So, those are our thoughts on all the big threads at the end of Trap. What about you?

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