Trap

Buying into the far-fetched premise behind Trap feels pricier than splurging for floor seats at the concert of the year.

The latest psychological thriller from director M. Night Shyamalan is more suspenseful in concept than execution, a loopy serial-killer saga that strains to be taken seriously.

The story takes place entirely over one day in Philadelphia, where firefighter Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is rewarding his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), for good grades by taking her to a matinee arena show featuring her favorite pop star. Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan).

Upon their arrival, everything seems perfectly normal, from the buzzing of overzealous screaming fans to the ubiquitous security personnel to parents scrambling for overpriced merchandise.

As a large FBI presence accumulates outside, however, Cooper receives a tip that the entire building is intended as a trap for a vicious killer known as the Butcher, set by a veteran profiler (Hayley Mills) convinced that the suspect is in the crowd.

Could it be true? While trying to maintain normalcy for Riley as dark secrets are revealed, Cooper becomes obsessed with entrances and exits and emergency personnel.

Once we learn the identity of the perpetrator, it becomes a battle of wits to conceal their identity, elude capture, and survive the night. Cooper becomes caught amid a series of strange disturbances triggering a downward spiral of mental illness, mommy issues, and unresolved trauma.

At first, Cooper’s paranoia is drawn from relatable father-daughter dynamics, with Hartnett offering a committed performance in a rare lead role.

However, Shyamalan’s screenplay is driven by coincidences and contrivances. Without much in the way of character backgrounds of motives, it doesn’t yield much sympathy for any of them. Along the way, there’s a shallow satire of fame in the social-media age and a half-hearted indictment of event security.

Casting his real-life daughter Saleka — a rising pop singer who composed most of the film’s music — seems like a such a shameless plug you halfway expect a QR code to appear in the corner of the screen. In fairness, she does have a captivating screen presence.

Trap is occasionally clever and consistently unsettling, yet the twists — a given in any Shyamalan project — arbitrarily and artificially ratchet up the tension.

Rated PG-13, 106 minutes.