Months after producing his daughter’s first directorial feature (The Watched), M. Night Shyamalan launches his other daughter’s pop career in this thriller they should have called Attack of the Nepo Babies.

A serial killer (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to see her favourite pop star (Saleka Shyamalan), only to realise the whole thing is a setup; an irony that is obviously lost on the Shyamalan clan. It turns out the gig is a sting operation designed to catch “the Butcher” (the Scalper would have been funnier) and the place is swarming with more cops than the audience at a Coldplay concert.

The killer finds all this out from an arena employee (Jonathan Langdon) who voluntarily hands over all the information, his ID card and the secret password, which is incredibly lucky considering most arena staff can’t even tell you where your seats are located. It also transpires that the police knew the Butcher would be attending because the ticket receipt was found at one of his crime scenes, which is incredibly unlucky considering no one has had a physical concert ticket since 2011.

The trailer and tagline imply the whole film takes place in the arena: “30,000 fans. 300 cops. 1 serial killer. No escape.” In fact the killer escapes almost immediately, after wandering into a top-secret police briefing and a particularly confusing encounter with Kid Cudi (Usher would have been funnier). Despite or possibly because of its blatant disregard for basic logic, the Taylor Swift-coded stadium section is the most entertaining and the movie grinds to a halt when the concert wraps up in the middle of the afternoon (?) with more than half the film still to go.

Common sense would suggest structuring the thriller the other way round, building up to the concert as a climactic set piece. But Trap is not a thriller but a vanity vehicle for the director’s daughter, and Shyamalan is M-bivalent to all else. He goes through the motions (ugly close-ups, imperceptible twist, staging a 30,000 person concert) just to make her seem good at singing, which he does by showing how terrible she is at acting. The only decent performance is Donoghue as the killer’s daughter, because she has to pretend to like the music of Saleka Shyamalan.