M. Night Shyamalan’s new “Hitchcockian” and, frankly, “Shyamalan-esqe”, thriller Trap is reviewed in depth. Sure the film is a lot of fun, but what does it actually mean? TFT film critics Jett Loe and Gareth Higgins break the movie down within the context of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and a society which doesn’t seem to foster psychological integration in men. Enjoy.
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Well, this might be a controversial show.
Controversial isn't going to end our friendship. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to that Ongoing Conversation, almost 20 years now about movies and their Meaning. It's The Film Talk.
I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins. The Conversation never ends. And as Jett would say, it's a big show, it's a huge show.
It's a gigantic show. It's an enormous show.
As huge as M. Night Shyamalan's talent.
Let, let us not be trapped by the enormity of that talent. As we talk about his new film, Trap, T-R-A-P, Trap. With, with Josh Hartnett as a no spoilers, but it's in the trailer, Serial Killer, who's taking his daughter to a, an arena concert.
And then after we discuss Trap, Dear Listener, for the subscribers among you, and who doesn't want to be a subscriber? For the subscribers among you, what you don't want to be a subscriber, you do want to be a subscriber.
Are you a subscriber to The Film Talk?
I, I do pay for The Film Talk. You do? It's only right.
Yes.
In soul, in soul dollars, we pay for The Film Talk, but it gives so much back. For, for those of you who are subscribers, we'll have a deeper discussion about M. Night Shyamalan's work in general and two of his films in particular.
Our favorites.
The one that is Jett's favorite, the one that is my favorite.
You'll have to wait to find out what they are, but we're going to talk about Trap. First of all, Jett, do you want to say anything else about Trap before we hear a clip that I believe we have?
Yes, that's, that's correct. We do have a clip. I mean, folks, Trap is one of those films that really answers that immortal cinematic question.
What if Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia Hitchcock, wasn't really an actress but a pop singer? How different would strangers on a train have been? Trap answers this.
We've got a clip. This is Josh Hartnett. He's trying to be a good dad.
The problem is, is that he's also a serial killer, and the police and the FBI organized, but I guess you could say we've got Helen Mirren at home. No, no, Hayley Mills, wonderful. They find they've got a concept, they've got an idea.
Hold on, hold on.
Were you just confusing them because they have the same initials?
Hayley Mills and Helen Mirren? No, that's a bonus. No, it's, you know, older lady with English accent.
We see her from behind. I'm thinking, oh, do they wish they could have gotten Helen Mirren? They got Hayley Mills.
I mean, she was in a film called The Parent Trap, so many layers. That's the reason I- There's a reason why.
Little joke there. Josh harden at Serial Killer, he's been trapped in a Popstar's concert. Popstar played by a very talented person, actress, singer, played by M.
Night Shyamalan's daughter. He's trapped at a concert with his daughter as the police try to get him. Serial Killer, The Butcher.
Let's listen in.
What's with all the police trucks outside?
The cameras are everywhere, Jamie.
I'm not supposed to tell them.
Something happening?
Don't rat me out. I won't. You know The Butcher?
That fricking nut job that goes around just chopping people up? Well, the feds or whatever heard that he's going to be here today, so they set up a trap for him. This whole concert, it's a trap.
They're watching all the exits, checking everyone that leaves. There's no way to get out of here.
And that is Trap featuring Josh Hartnett as the almost anonymously named Cooper, with Ariel Donahue as Riley and Salika Night Shyamalan as Lady Raven, the pop star whose concert turns out to be a front for this attempt at taking down this person
who's been doing these horrendous, terrible things to people and apparently having a network of suburban houses in which to do it. So, okay, I know you're dying to know, Jett, what did I think about Trap?
Gareth Higgins goes to the film talk for many years. What did you think about M. Night Shyamalan's thriller, Trap?
Well, I'm going to say it's less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are tremendously entertaining.
The whole, the setup of the thing, the sense of place, the fact that this feels like a recognizable city, the arena has texture and proportion to it. And this central performance by Josh Hartnett is actually really quite good.
I believed in him as both a suburban dad trying to be a good dad, and as someone with an absolutely horrendous, I mean, there aren't words to describe it, secret about these evil things that he's doing to people.
I absolutely believed him in the role. Along with his performance and, I don't know, the context of the piece, it's also quite funny in places.
And I think this is the primary mistake, the category error that people make when judging Shyamalan's films, they take him as seriously as they think he takes himself.
And I think from day one in his career, he's always had a light touch about some things. And also a kind of a heartfelt thing as well. If you look at The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, particularly The Village, there is compassion in this guy's films.
And the last thing I'll say, no, just by way of kind of opening is Hitchcock's the right comparison. I mean, it's B-movie Hitchcock. Clearly Hitchcock is one of the angels or imps on Shyamalan's shoulder.
There's a lot of kind of great, you know, great's too strong. There's a lot of good camera work. There's a lot of kind of smart, snappy editing.
There's a lot of kind of entertainment to be had in this film. What matters more to me is whether or not it comes together well. I don't think it does.
But even more than that, what it's actually about, what it's an allegory for, is way more interesting to me than the experience of watching the film itself. And I look forward to getting that in, getting into that with you later on.
But that's generally my feeling. I don't like saying this often. But it's, it's well, you know, it's a film that's, that's, that's made in good faith, but I think it's less than the sum of its parts.
There are some things that are patently ridiculous in it, and it still has something meaningful to say. But we'll get to that. What about you, Jett?
Well, we could do a little quiz here.
The listener, the listener demands to know, what did you think?
You are a listener right now.
While I'm talking, you are a listener, Gareth. So you along with the listeners could ask yourselves, because folks, Gareth, other listeners, other than Gareth, don't know. No, they don't.
You don't know. You don't know what I'm going to say. You don't know how I feel about the film.
We don't, we don't speak.
You could choose not to tell me as well.
That would, that would feel like a letdown, unless they're paying not to hear me, which would make sense. They're actually paying to have me not talk, which could be a new revenue stream. Here's the thing.
So you don't know what I'm going to say. What do you think I thought of M. Night Shyamalan's Trap?
I think that, I think you loved every second of it.
Loved it.
I loved every second.
And I think that's because you decided two minutes into it that it's a comedy. And you were going to treat it as a comedy.
And that it was, it was the kind of psychological horror analog to the Church Lady skit in SNL, in the sense that the Church Lady skit is ridiculous, over the top, absurd, and also kind of takes place in the real world.
And that you think this film is not about serial killers at all. It's about how it's hard to be a dad.
You know, the first five, the first few minutes of this film, first five minutes, you know, as somebody's a dad to a couple of kids or 11, 12, my daughter's 11 years old, it was like a documentary. Here's the thing, I did love it.
And I want to talk a little bit about, did you mention silliness or a lighter touch or comedy?
Because his first couple of films, because The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable especially, and Be Seen as Solemn, people think some will equate that with an absence of humor or an absence of seeing the lighter side.
And the fact is, if you look at this guy's filmography, he loves being silly.
And that's part of the reason for there was this huge critical claim, but part of the reason why for his initial downfall was that people weren't incorporating into their mindset the possibilities for silliness in his films. He loves being silly.
I seen Rick auderman, if we did this on the old show, he was built up so much and there was such a downfall. I think I said something along the lines.
This may have happened while we were in hiatus between our old show and this one, is that all it's going to take is one popular hit, semi-popular and then he'll be back. Then that happened, I think, with something like Split. He likes the silliness.
What is great about Trap is, and maybe this is also an influence of binge-watching, of folks watching shows now where you might have a comedy episode and then a musical episode and a serious episode, is there's not a consistent tone but that's on
purpose. There's the Hitchcockian thriller, then you get sort of the dad-daughter documentary, and then at the end, you have this very serious ending scene with Josh Hartner talking to his wife, Alison Pill, and then the whole audience, I watch you,
I like sitting in the back so I get to see the audience reaction. So the audience is having a good time. It was a pretty full crowd. They're laughing, oh, this is ridiculous, this is silly.
And then when that scene happened, everyone sat forward and the whole audience got quiet, it was totally engaged. And that was like a scene out of Unbreakable. We're going to talk about Unbreakable in the subscriber episode, right?
But it was right out of Unbreakable or something.
Oh, are we going to talk about Unbreakable?
Well, I would like to.
As a spoiler for the subscriber episode.
I'm not saying that's my favorite M. Night Shyamalan. It could be the happening.
It could be. I'm not saying it is. Got to listen.
You're not paying me to shut up. So it is very nimble. He's a very nimble director.
We can talk about his use of the camera, which is wonderful in all of his movies. But he's a very nimble director. So he's able to do, oh, this is going to be the Hitchcockian bit, right?
And then this is going to be the serious drama. And this is going to be the lighthearted. And this is going to be like something out of the great.
Is it Carl Franklin, director, who was in? Oh, goodness. What was that film?
He directed Out of Time, right? With Denzel Washington, which is a great kind of false move and one false move. The fun of those films, like when you watch Out of Time with Denzel Washington is like your protagonist is very is flawed.
He's more very morally gray and he's in a tricky situation. He's going to get caught. And so you enjoy watching.
How is he going to get out of these situations? So Trapp has that as well, right? Where you're identifying almost with Josh Hartner, a suburban dad.
Oh, no, he's going to get caught by the cops. Very famous scene. And we talked about Hitchcock.
Very famous scene in Psycho. Anthony Perkins, his mom. Oh, boy, his mom's piece of work.
His mom, no spoilers here for Psycho. His mom does something terrible. Anthony Perkins is cleaning up, puts a body in a car, car goes in the swamp.
You watch that movie with people who have never seen it, watching like at home or in a packed theater. When the car, he's trying to hide evidence of murder. When the car gets stuck in the swamp, the audience goes, spoiler, spoiler, spoilers, yes.
Because you are now identifying with Anthony Perkins like, oh God, he can't come up with the murder. All of a sudden, we become culpable. And the same thing happens in Trap.
And in fact, Shyamalan does something very interesting where he has these point of view shots where you are the character looking at Hardin and vice versa. You are Hardin as people are engaging with him.
Something like out of the show, Peep Show or I was at Buffalo 66. So, it's really nimble that way, you know?
In the end, when he's talking with Alison Pill, he says, you know, you feel like, spoilers, he's going to kill Alison Pill, but she asked just for a conversation and she's going to serve him pie. They're going to eat pie.
And after that, he's going to kill her. And he says, I can eat this in five bites. So, what happens?
People in the audience, you are counting the number of bites. You are absolutely counting the number of bites. It's really well done in that regard.
Does that make sense, Gareth? Gareth Higgins?
Well, I mean, we haven't even talked about what the film means. I want to acknowledge that you feel that way about it.
Oh, wow.
And yes.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
No, it does. And I have no objections to what you've just said.
Okay.
And what landed on me deeper than those things you're talking about is how you can read this film as an allegory for how we deceive ourselves by the trappings, no pun intended, of middle class suburban life that we're not complicit in the suffering
of others. You know, in the case of Cooper's character, he has a literal person trapped in a basement. And there's, I mean, this is actually the joke of this film. You'll remember the detail of this.
I don't remember the exact words. Like he makes a joke about this person who he's effectively torturing and says something like he's into environmental sustainability or something like that.
Do you remember the he makes a joke about Spencer as a kind of he's looking down this caricatured middle class. Everything's fine with me. I'm I don't have any responsibility for my fellow people.
And I say this is someone who'd certainly be perceived as middle class. You know, I feel like the film is turning a mirror on any of us who are not paying attention to the impact of our choices.
It's just making it explicit in the form of he's, he's dressed like a bore. He's, you know, boring dad, dress sense, friendly and in a lot of ways. But I mean, at one point he pushes a girl down the stairs.
That's actually the first time we see him actually do something cruel and it is shocking. Actually, it is shocking. In fact, when he does it, I initially thought that he really just do that.
And from that point on, I was thinking, oh, this is this is about how the degree to which we opt out of interdependency or try to opt out of interdependency or hit ourselves that we're not interdependent.
And the degree to which we aren't tuning in to the power, privilege and resources that we may hold and how we can use those to serve others, as well as not tuning in to the needs we have and how we can, through community, ask for those needs to be
met, is the degree to which we are like Cooper in this film. And I say we, I'm not saying you or they, because this film made me think about my myself.
I, and I want to find words for whatever the opposite of damning something with faint praise is because I don't overstate the case, because I really don't think the film is, there's something unusual about M.
Night Shyamalan's career, which we'll get into in the bonus part of the episode, which is to do with the, there is a dramatic heft to his earlier films that is not matched by his most recent films.
And I don't know if that's he's gone off the boil, or frankly, he may feel like he's become more nimble. He may be happier, he may well be, and that this word you used, nimble, may be exactly what he's striving for.
They're all beautifully crafted film, but there is a dramatic heft to The Village, to Unbreakable, to The Sixth Sense, that I think is missing in later films.
Well, I get that. We can talk about that again in the later show, the bonus half of this episode.
But the thing which I was so striking, and what's always going to sit with me about this film is that there is this whole sequence right at the end of the film, which is out of his other films, which is out of The Village, which is out of
Unbreakable, which is out of The Sixth Sense. And those films, these themes are about family and the broken relationship or they're films that ask the connection how to connect.
And more specifically, how do you connect with the other in your life, who's your spouse, your partner, your lover? The close-ups of hands in films like Unbreakable, how do you orient in The Village? How do you connect with somebody else?
Especially how do you connect if we're broken? And we are all broken, and it's made explicit in Trap. He believes, Cooper, someone who's cooped up, right?
Cooper believes, Josh harder, that we're broken, that we're all in pieces. And he externalized that by cutting people up into pieces, right? So he is externalized.
That's the way of his way of rather than integrating himself as a whole, he externalizes this understanding, his own broken soul by cutting up other people. So all of his films have that heft at some level, I would argue, that the heft of the...
It's his way of trying to understand or trying to ask the question, how do we actually deal with people? And the thing is like, you know, Cooper is this like suburban dad and he's the guy.
Cooper, you know what, I'm sure he loves watching Jack Reacher, right? He likes reading the Patterson novels, he probably loves the show. And why do these dads like Jack Reacher?
It's very, very simple. Jack Reacher has no responsibilities. He is a drifter, comes from town, he's got a special set of skills, he gets the lady, solves the problem and he moves on.
And people like Cooper or people like myself have responsibilities. Doesn't matter if I'm having a bad day, does it? I still have to make sure the kiddos get to school.
What if one of them is throwing a tantrum or having problems? Right? And so I fail as a dad, I fail every day.
Does that make me want to have like a man cave? Sure. Guess where I'm recording this podcast right now?
In a shed, man cave, lined with film books. And what does Cooper have? He's got a series of man caves.
And what does he say in this movie? He says when he goes to his room that he rents, he's got a table and a chair and he plans out his murders. And he said that gives him just as much pleasure as doing the actual murdering.
He gets to get away. So M. Night Shyamalan is just making a thrill out of it.
It could have been a drama with all this, it could have been ordinary people, right? He just happens to enjoy doing Hitchcock, which is totally understandable. It's fun.
Get to have fun. It's fun to be in that play scape of like what if somebody was a murderer? Because these are transgressive and these are things we would not do in real life.
And so that's why I think the film is a success. It has that thematic heft that runs through it, but still fun and silly. And I was kind of almost hoping for the unbreakable theme to come up at the end, just like it did in Split.
It's like, oh, is he another character in the unbreakable universe?
In the unbreakable universe, yeah.
Because he does have like superpowers at some level.
Sure, sure. So let's just briefly look at this question. I mean, you mentioned Psycho and Psycho is a film I have a great deal of ambivalence about because, obviously at one level, it's a masterpiece.
It's every frame is a work of art. It's exciting. It's scary and it has something to say.
And at another level, it's profoundly, it could be read as profoundly prejudiced against people with certain kinds of mental health dynamics going on. Never mind trans people or anybody who doesn't occupy a cisgender reality.
The echo in trap is that I think it pretty, you know, we see that Josh Hardin has an OCD diagnosis. We see him fold, he mentions that and he folds a napkin in a certain way.
And I think it's important just to say, I'm tired of mental health diagnoses paralleling cruel behaviour. I'm not just tired. It's risky to do that.
Of course, it is the case that sometimes people with particular kinds of psychological challenges also do bad things. But clearly, most of the time, they and we don't.
And as someone who's, you know, I've had my own experience with OCD, my own experience with PTSD.
I'm interested as someone who loves psycho as much as you do and who's well versed in these things, what's your thought on the use of mental health diagnoses that exist in the real world, paralleling cruel inhuman behavior and a narrative that some
people are going to take literally. He literally has OCD and it has literally contributed to him literally being a serial killer.
Well, I've got two thoughts there. First of all, I wonder if that's an inside Shyamalan family joke. I wonder if he has OCD.
Oh, if he has OCD itself.
I think that maybe I'm just curious.
That was my first of all watching.
And that's a piece.
And I don't mean to stop you, but that certainly in terms of the ethics of comedy, I've always felt that when you get into tricky territory with comedy, once you find out a person is joking about themselves or about some suffering that they've
experienced, it's a whole different matter. Much easier for a Northern Irish person to make jokes about the troubles than to hear people who are not from here making jokes about the troubles.
So I've heard. Sorry, I've got to cut that out. I used to do a whole bit called The Troublings.
You were an adopted son of this land.
I would like to apologize now for all the comedy material I did on another show of mine when I was directing over there at Northern Ireland on The Troublings.
I wholeheartedly, and I'm older now and wiser. That was my initial thought. I wonder if this is an inside joke.
We haven't even talked about his daughter, who is a major player in this film. That was my first thought. Then we're talking about Psycho.
Of course, Psycho famously ends with this long sequence in which everything is explained by the psychiatrist.
I think one of the functions of that sequence is really, it's not a filler, but what it is is it gives the audience time to relax after the horror they've gone through, they're processing everything that they can file out of the theater.
So I think that's a filmic device and Hitchcock had to say something. Andy refutes that idea too, by the way, in his next film, The Birds, because he does have, who was Hume Cronin's wife many years?
Jessica Tandy.
Jessica Tandy. You think she's going to start explaining the psychology of what's going on and then she goes, yeah, no. That's not actually what's happening with Mitch at all.
I think Jessica Tandy and Tippi Hindren, they have this convo and I think that he refutes what he did in Psycho there. I agree, but again, we don't know. He did get a lot of flag food.
Was it something not dissimilar in The Village by having someone with mental disabilities in The Village?
Yeah.
Be the villain and a lot of people said this was terrible.
Adrian Brody, his character has developmental disabilities and in Split, you literally have somebody with multiple personality disorder and sure, these things get used as horror tropes. I don't have a strong enough view on this.
It is a question, if we ever got to talk to him, I'd want to ask him to comment on it because he does seem to be a compassionate person.
This is not the same as when the Da Vinci code movie was released, one of the community organizations that advocates on behalf of people with albinism, I believe in the UK, issued a press release saying that you've got this psychopathic character
played by, I think, Paul Bettany in The Da Vinci code who has albinism, and yet again, someone who would be colloquially potentially offensively referred to as an albino is playing the psycho killer. I remember hearing a radio interview in which
someone advocating on behalf of the needs and lives of people with albinism was talking about this, and they had a commentator on to say, oh, don't be so politically correct, don't be ridiculous. Show me the facts, show me the facts.
This spokesperson showed them that if I'm remembering correctly, there had been 60 films released since 1970 that had an identifiable character with albinism in them.
Of those 60 films, 59 of them featured the character with albinism killing somebody. So at that point, credit to the commentator, she responded with, fair enough, you've got a point here.
And there is something to be said about when psychological challenges are almost always in alignment with doing cruel things. It's worth talking about. And yes, it may well be a family end joke in the Shyamalan household.
I have one last question for you though, Jett, about Trap.
Yes. I still have more to say about Trap, but please, ask away.
Well, okay. Okay, good.
Haven't even started. We haven't even begun.
Good. We were supposed to do 20 minutes on Trap and-
I told you it wasn't going to happen.
Why does Cooper take his shirt off at the end?
Who doesn't want to see Josh Hardner with his shirt off, man? Come on.
That's the only reason he takes his shirt off at the end. When he started to unbutton his shirt, I was like, yeah, lots of people do want to see Josh Hardner with his shirt off.
Let's say you're in the- hold on. Hold on.
You're in the 23rd century. You're in the 23rd century, okay? Picture yourself.
Hold on. You think materials, we got much more advanced computers, we got ships that can travel faster than light. So you would think the fabric on shirts would stain and tear resistant.
But gosh darn it, William Shatner's shirt seemed to get torn all the time in the Star Trek, the original series. You know what I'm saying? We got to put bums in the seat.
This is a for-profit enterprise.
If you were going to write a rhyming couplet about the star of this film, you've got the end of your second line.
Well, who is the star of the film? I know we got to move on quickly.
The star is philadelphia. Is it set in philadelphia? It's not really clear.
I don't think they say where it is.
Well, it's in all the cop uniforms. Yeah, you can see it because it says philadelphia everywhere. But I think it's shot in Toronto.
Let's talk about the star of the film because one of the things that I love about this movie, I know he did a film called Split, is that we shift the protagonist in dramatic ways.
I did not expect, did you, that the pop star, Raven, would become a protagonist for a whole stretch of the film. And that was like, that totally unbalances you. She becomes the star.
And then we had this whole thing about the power of social media, which is great. And then Alison Peele becomes the star. And then, spoiler, spoiler, spoilers, there's the reveal that she's the one that set the trap.
She's the actual person. That's the big twist. And again, that ends the name trap, guy's cooped, is he trapped in a marriage?
He can't be Jack Reacher. He can't be a drifter going to town. He is trapped.
He's trapped by domesticity. He got trapped by his wife. That's the fear, the male fear of being trapped in a space, your way down.
Is there more to say about this film?
Well, there is.
I don't know that there is.
I mean, we're going to talk about, you know, I guess we can talk about his film making style in the second half of the episode, the subscriber episode, because he's, you know, such a great, has such a great use of the camera and for storytelling.
But here's the thing, in films like Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, you could think about the lack of dialogue, less dialogue, because he's able to communicate so many ideas just through movement of camera blocking of the actors.
In this film, there is the greatest example of a certain thing that I may have ever seen in movies.
So dear listeners, you ever watch a movie and then you'll hear somebody utter a line of dialogue, but you don't see their lips move because it's from behind or it's a wide shot.
And they're saying something like, we have to take this exit because, you know, this is the red door. They're explaining, it's like little bits of connective tissue. They decided in the edit, oh, we need to explain something here.
In the Untouchables, for instance, in the original theatrical version, they've changed this and it made me very sad because as a kid, me and all my buddies laughed so much. In the end of the Untouchables, Kevin Costner is chasing the bad guy.
I think it's Billy Drago played by Billy Drago. He's a Billy Drago character. If you know what I'm talking about, if you know, you know.
And a guard gets shot and he throws his gun to Kevin Costner on the ground. And it was clear in the edit, they thought it wasn't clear enough that he's giving his gun to Costner.
So there's a badly dubbed line of, and it's terrible and it always made us laugh. And then I watched it recently. And again, maybe the first 10 years, The Untouchables was watched on VHS, watched it on DVD, watched on Blu-ray.
That line is in there and then they've changed it, right? They've turned it down because it was ridiculous. You know, this sort of badly dubbed, like, how did he get, how did that happen?
Well, he must have had the secret key, you know, dubbed later. And this film has the most examples of that I've ever seen. And why that is, I'm not sure.
They just felt in the in the edit, like, it's just not clear. It's like, hey, luckily, we have time to go to the pop stand because there's a break between songs. Like, do we need that?
It just happens every few minutes, which shows that maybe this is this is I'm doing a con to my I was pro Shyamalan. This is the negative thing was a little more junky, right? Because it's not as as visually crisp and clean as his other films.
But you know what? It's okay. Well, we'll allow that on the film talk.
So it's a kind of you know, we said whenever we were rebooting the show, that every every episode we would we would recommend the one film you should watch this week.
And if it wasn't just been released, we would recommend we're still working on the format, an alternative film. So would you recommend Trap as the film, the one film that people should watch this week?
Well, it depends if they want that if they want a thriller like that set it set in a big stadium like this. Don't forget there's sudden Death with jean-claude Van Damme and Powers Booth.
Black Sunday, Black Sunday. John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday.
Is not a-
Does it take place in a stadium?
The climax, yes. So dear listeners, if you're not familiar with Black Sunday, it was a blockbuster book probably. The-
It was, it was written by the guy, by Thomas Harris, who went on to write the handel-akier books.
So I bet it was a good book, Page Turner, but the question is, how do you make it like a Goodyear blimp threatening?
It's so slow and it's moving and it's-
Have Max Zorin be on it.
That's a better blimp movie. So Black Sunday, the blimp is supposed to attack and kill a bunch of people in a stadium. Have you seen Black Sunday?
No.
Bruce Dern is in it.
Bruce Dern is in it, my friend, which is always a plus. Fantastic in Hitchcock's last movie.
Black Sunday, the blimp, I just recall it's just a bunch of people running around in different directions, sort of like Hugh Quetzalcoatl, the Larry Cohen film, where you just like shoot people running in different directions, people screaming.
Maybe there's one shot optical, you know, a printing of a blimp. It's not, it's not, it does have one harrowing scene with Bruce Dern testing his weapon.
Okay, so Black Sunday is not the one film people should watch this week. I don't think.
You should see Psycho.
Yeah, or The Village, which might be a spoiler for our bonus episode.
Well, we can agree to disagree on that. Anything else you want to say about Trap before we move to the second half of our show, the subscriber bonus business?
Trap will not be featured in our bonus episode on our favorite M. Night Shyamalan films. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see it, and it's worth thinking about.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't see it.
The way things are moving in streaming services, I saw that Twisters is already on there. borderlands is going to be on there in a couple of days.
So by the time you listen to this, if you hold off for about four or five days from listening to this episode, it's probably going to be on streaming. Yeah, absolutely. It's worth your time.
Great performance. We haven't even talked really about his performance. wonderful performance by Josh Hardin and by Alison Pill and M.
Night Shyamalan's daughter as well.
His daughter is Salika Shyamalan. I think she doesn't use the night. She's known mononymously as Salika, like you're known as Jett.
Ask your doctor if monolity is right for you.
Folks, we're going to go to our second half of the show now. If you want to subscribe, don't forget, you can go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk. You can subscribe through Apple Podcasts if that's your jam.
Thanks for listening. We appreciate it. Now, let's go to our subscriber.
Bonus episode.
We will indeed, but for those of you who are not subscribers, we still love you. While we'd welcome you to subscribe, most heartily, if you don't subscribe, we should bid you farewell at this point. I've been Gareth Higgins.
I've been Jett Loe.
We'll keep talking.
Right now.