Trap + Shadow of a Doubt

• Sunday, August 24 at 6:00pm (Trap) + 8:15pm (Shadow of a Doubt)
• Monday, September 1 at 1:15pm (Trap) +3:30pm (Shadow of a Doubt)

Trap
M. Night Shyamalan, 2024, U.S., 106m
A father (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a pop concert, only to realize the venue has been transformed into an elaborate sting operation… and he may not be who we think he is. On its surface, Trap plays as a cat-and-mouse thriller set against the backdrop of a pop musical and compressed within the sealed-off enormity of a stadium flanked by screaming fangirls and the FBI. But beneath the surface of its full-scale live show—featuring original music by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka (as fictional star Lady Raven)—lies one of the director’s most taut and formally playful late-style provocations about spectatorship, guilt, plot twists, and the violence pulsing beneath mass entertainment. Everyone is watching someone, but not necessarily seeing the truth—a preoccupation running through Shyamalan’s work, from the misperceptions at the heart of The Sixth Sense and the fear-based surveillance of The Village to the moral tests of Old and Knock at the Cabin.

Followed by:

Shadow of a Doubt
Alfred Hitchcock, 1943, U.S., 35mm, 108m
A California town’s quiet is upended when Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) arrives for a visit, and his favorite niece (Teresa Wright), also named Charlie, begins to suspect he’s not the charming gentleman he seems. Allegedly Hitchcock’s personal favorite among his own films, and his first set in an everyday American small town, Shadow of a Doubt subverts the idealized wartime image of the U.S. with a grinning menace. Who but Cotten, shifting with eerie ease from affable guest to something more serpentine, could deliver the film’s infamous dinner-table monologue? A turning point in Hitchcock’s career, the film essentially pioneered the domestic noir, the trope of the serial killer next door, and marked a bold shift toward the intimate, psychologically driven suspense that would define his later masterpieces.

CCAP and Audio description available at Trap screenings.