“Sympathy for Cooper: How Trap Explores Mental Illness”
by Amrita Kaur
The best horror films rely on monsters, killers, and malevolent nature to express the fears we have, the ways we fall victim to them, as well as overcome them. Fear is a strong cultural force that can be used to justify mass atrocity or signal the need for change. The monster comes from the outskirts of society and wishes to affect the inside—to make the sanctum we live in disgusting and unfamiliar. Serial killers in film generally originate from fringe beginnings—apart from the normal person—they’re misanthropic, dangerous. The killer has an abnormal psychology, foreign and not easily understood; they don’t fear what we do—instead, they strike fear in others. Cultural fears are often sublimated in fictional killers as expressions of their difference. Creating a film to be seen widely has a steep financial barrier, thus the culture from which most popular movies come from is Suburban America. The suburban home boasts safe insides, which functions as something to protect and free from jurisprudence. It’s surrounded by a dangerous outside to be policed—think of Alison Ettel or Chris Benoit. The separateness built into suburban life is built upon and exacerbates fear of the other. Trap (2024) uses an archetypal serial killer—a tall, attractive, dutiful, white father—to express the personal fears of the director, M. Night Shyamalan.
Many of Shyamalan’s previous films have dealt with mental illness: Signs (2002) and Split (2016), for instance. He explores the feelings of people who live on the outside. Trap spends most of its runtime exploring The Butcher’s psychology and following his violent actions. Cooper, The Butcher, is the picture of suburban excellence. He is a firefighter with a loving family and wonderful home. The film opens on him taking his 13-year-old, superfan daughter to see her favourite popstar, Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka). The father-daughter relationship between Cooper and Riley is the core of the film. Despite himself, he wants his daughter to enjoy herself and have everything she wants. His daughter’s experience of the concert and of him is the center of the thriller. Cooper is deeply afraid of his daughter realising who he is, while, simultaneously, Cooper is being hounded by a task force set on capturing him, headed by a woman with expert knowledge on his psychology.
The conversations are shot in intimate close-ups—separating the characters with the shot/reverse shot—allowing the audience to juxtapose the written conversation with the images of their reactions to each other.
Whenever Cooper’s daughter becomes confused or questions his behaviour, Cooper pulls himself together and attempts normalcy. While following Cooper, we look into his head and see shots of his mother (where she isn’t there), exploring his mix of pleasure and shame through the image of his mother. Cooper’s mother was the only person in his life to recognize his abnormality and punish him for it. Cooper’s mind is pulled in different places, and between cutting the world into pieces and fatherhood.
It’s impossible to be two people, but he wants nothing except for both. When Cooper engages his monstrosity, the film frames him in pieces, showing half his face and then juxtaposing that with the image of his victim post-attack. He repeats how everyone is in pieces, how he must keep his two lives separate, his passions meeting in the middle at the concert.
Trap is deeply personal, born out of conversations Shyamalan had with his daughter Saleka. He expresses through Cooper the way many neurotic people feel as parents. Everyone has a family, a parental figure of some kind, has experienced punishment. It’s difficult to show all of yourself to someone, and ultimately, some things will have to be left out.
The fear within Cooper—of being seen and rejected—is universally understandable.
Trap juxtaposes scenes of Cooper acting violently (in fear of the police) with his kindness to Riley (in fear of her gaze). Still in hopes of escaping, he almost leaves his daughter trying to find an exit, but then later gets her on-stage with V.I.P. access. The camera holds on Riley’s joy, cinematically expounding on how special the moments he gives her are. All the while, we see Cooper in close-ups, afraid, framing him against the psychologist/police effort to capture him.
A person with Cooper’s competing desires and psychological problems, within the suburban context, is left to pursue both as best he can. The pieces that make up Cooper separate on the lines of the understandable—suburban family man trying to do good—and the hidden, undiagnosed mental illness exacerbated by his mother’s treatment of him. He wants to be a father, and he wants to kill, but to him, killing is an externalization of his fear of being innately tainted. Separate and different from others. However, when Cooper looks at his daughter, he sees nothing but her, her whole face. When he watches her dance on stage with her favourite singer, the camera shows all of him.
The struggle to keep himself together rests on his understanding of how integral he is to the family he’s built.
The threat to Cooper is a threat to his family, to their lives as much as to his freedom. His daughter is innocent in the whole affair, and will be left to pick up the pieces of her life.
Casting Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka, speaks to the film’s understanding of Cooper’s fear. Movies take a long time and obsessive focus to be made, taking artists away from their families. As a successful, independent filmmaker, Shyamalan self-produces many of his movies. His art separates his life into family life and work life, and he seemingly attempts to devote equal time to both. Shyamalan uses Trap to bring together his two pieces, to integrate his daughter and her music with his work.
Cooper is the twisted reflection of Shyamalan, able to express irrevocably broken neuroticism—enacted through the violent art his family can’t be a part of—while still being a good father to Riley. Saleka performs an original song as Lady Raven, singing about forgiving her father for his past transgressions. While they don’t look at each other, the music in the film connects Cooper and his daughter. The act of filmmaking for Shyamalan is connecting himself—his art—to his family, to his daughter. Shyamalan is able to sublimate the feelings of not being good enough, there enough, familial rejection, of being bad without hope of change, into an experience understandable to anyone.
The personal struggle with mental health is almost never as bombastic as it is in film. Most people’s lives implode with much less pressure and effort.
Feeling different, and the shame that accompanies this universal feeling, is debilitating, and I find Shyamalan’s exploration through the lens of a serial killer both comforting and kind. In Cooper’s last conversation with his wife he laments how he’ll be taken away from his life, from his daughter. It upsets him genuinely and greatly; it’s the only time in the film that Cooper releases his emotions. His eyes well up with tears when he tells his wife, “We could’ve managed”. Unlike the coldness of the earlier Butcher scenes, Cooper becomes hot with anger. He calls rage unfamiliar and overwhelming, and his feelings are expressed plainly on his face. He hates not being able to see his daughter and son grow up. He tells the specter of his mother that he thought he was pretending, but that his feelings were real; she tells him, “Not all of you is a monster.” We see him cry, he walks toward her.
A lesser film would be much more concerned with depicting the abject evil of Cooper, his depravity and willingness to delve into total misanthropy.
Shyamalan indiscreetly shows us the monster, while allowing the central familial relationship to humanize and contextualize Cooper. The emotionality Shyamalan pulls out of a scene of a husband attempting to murder his wife is unique. Cooper’s ability to be a loving father allows him to leave something good behind despite being deeply evil. Shyamalan expends careful effort in baring Cooper’s soul. Even after everything we see him do, he’s just a man, and he is not okay. He must be caught, must be punished, but Cooper’s capture and removal is tragic just the same. We aren’t able to forgive Cooper, but the clinical understanding of him as a beautiful shell holding a monster falls short of who he really is. Josh Hartnett puts everything in Cooper’s final hug with his daughter. Riley sees him, and in her own way, understands him to be her dad.
Trap utilizes the serial killer and its mythology differently than other horror films. Cooper is a human threat, completely human, as much as anyone else, as much as his neighbours. Film relies on the extreme and fantastical, it’s the job of the filmmaker to show us how the plot relates back to us. Shyamalan uses Cooper as a question: is someone as fundamentally different as a serial killer capable of love? The answer is yes. If a monster can be empathized with, then we all deserve empathy. The problems we have don’t define our lives, but the actions we take every day do.
losing our grip on purpose 