The Trap
**Seen for the 2024 Atlanta Film Festival.
Lena Headey is quite accustomed with complicated familial relationships after eight seasons as Cersei Lannister on “Game of Thrones.” In “The Trap,” she looks to explore a story of fractured people reconnecting; by expanding on her previous 32-minute short film, we can see more of the relationships build between Michelle Fairley’s Michelle, a woman handy with mechanical issues who enjoys isolation, and James Nelson-Joyce’s Joe, a stranger who comes into her life, and turns it upside down. When it focuses on them, Headey’s film is on strong emotional footing; when it tries to complicate matters, however, it falls victim to building in padding into the film that doesn’t need to be there.
When the film begins, Michelle is someone who feels at home isolated from people, content to make stacks of stones, almost as a comfort and relaxing technique. A friend (Steven Waddington) invites her to come to his daughter’s birthday; after all, she helped get the daughter’s birthday present, a car, up to snuff. She leaves the party before it’s over; a solitary life is most comfortable for her. One day, Joe is driving by, and needs help with his car. She obliges, and the two strike up a bond. And then, a bombshell drops, and the film becomes about one person searching for their past, and another one bracing for what finding their past could mean.
The choices made for Michelle and Joe’s relationship are unsettling ones once we discover the true nature of whom they are to one another, but focusing on that takes away from the insightful nature of Headey’s writing of the characters. “The Trap” is about a person’s past being forced back into their lives by someone who has found it impossible to move on from their uncertainty about their own, and that is the most gripping part of Headey’s film. She gets strong work our of Fairley (the matriarch of House Stark in “Game of Thrones”) and Nelson-Joyce, and seeing the tension between the two characters- one whom is fragile and one whom is a live wire- is the heart of the film. Some of the subplots- involving unrequited love and strangers met along the way- flesh out the world but hardly add anything to the emotional journey these two characters are going on. More impactful is Ian Hart as a common link between Michelle and Joe, and one that will be less-than-welcome in their lives, no matter how much one of them wants to think it will help them out. The film is fairly muted, but when it finds its focus, it’s a compelling watch, and a good indicator that Headey is someone to follow behind the camera.
