I always make sure to check in on writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s films just to see if they ever improve. Shyamalan is notorious for what a charitable person might call his “unevenness” as a filmmaker. In a long career, he’s gone from the heights of extremely effective and wildly successful films, with The Sixth Sense (1999) as the primary example, to the depths of abysmally silly films that deserve to fail, as in the case of the notoriously extravagant bomb Lady in the Water (2006). He’s rebuilt his career with varied gambits like self-effacing, purely commercial hits (The Last Airbender) and, more recently, low-budget, self-financed, auteurish endeavors that guaranteed him total creative control (The Visit, Split, Glass, Old, Knock at the Cabin).

You’ve at least got to give him credit for adaptability.

Trap is his latest, and it’s getting more mainstream hype than most of his recent films. This one is a psychological thriller about a kindly firefighter and proud father named Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) who’s taking his thirteen-year-old daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to one of those pop-star concerts where the kids can scream out their enthusiasm and sing along obsessively with the lyrics, while the parents pretend to be entertained but mostly zone out.