The Trap – Klopka (2007)

Directed by: Srdan Golubovic | 106 minutes | drama, thriller, crime | Actors: Nebojsa Glogovac, Natasa Ninkovic, Miki Manojlovic, Anica Dobra, Bogdan Diklic, Vuk Kostic, Vojin Cetkovic, Melita Bihali, Dejan Cukic, Marko Djurovic, Nebojsa Ilic, Boris Isakovic, Ivana Jovanovic, Milorad Mandicladen, Anale Markovic Filip Petrovico

How far will you go to save your child’s life? Are you willing to kill the president, as Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) was asked to do in season 1 of the ’24’ series? Or are you capable of another criminal act, taking an entire ward of the hospital hostage to force the doctors to perform a major surgery, like Denzel Washington did in “John Q”? ‘The Trap’ (‘Klopka’) is somewhere in between these two angles. But where ‘John Q’ got bogged down in a preachy account of the state of health care in America, ‘The Trap’ has become an intense psychological drama, gradually signaling and exposing social inequality.

As in ‘John Q’, ‘The Trap’ criticizes the social system and health insurance or reimbursements. The poorly earning Mladic (Nebojsa Glogovac) cannot make use of any arrangement when his son develops a life-threatening illness and needs an urgent operation. Then they just have to put their pride aside and put an ad in the newspaper to raise money. The powerlessness of the couple is terrible to watch. Something “banal” like money should make your son die… It gets interesting when the sole moneylender, Milos (Miki Manojlovic), demands Mladic to kill a businessman.

Milos tells Mladic that he is a bad man, but Mladic doesn’t want to hear it. Even later, when his son’s situation worsens and he starts to consider the murder, he does not ask again how bad his potential victim is, in order to soothe his conscience. A surprising choice, leaning on the idea that a person is a person, and that killing is inherently bad. In addition, it would have made little difference to Mladic who it is, given the reason why he is doing it. He would have killed Mother Theresa, so to speak, if he could save his son with that.

Not that Mladic’s decision is easy. On the contrary. And he does want to talk to his wife about it, but at the same time he doesn’t want to burden her with it. Ultimately, he will effectively have to trade his own life for that of his son and the happiness of his wife. Because with this deed behind his name, his life is all but ruined. And when it turns out that the victim’s wife is the mother of a classmate of the son, whom Mladic befriends, and she even wants to donate money for the operation, the demons in Mladic’s head can no longer be driven away. The whole woman’s involvement in the whole thing is quite contrived, but does make for interesting psychologically charged scenes between her and Mladic. And even if Milos does express the social critique of the film somewhat emphatically, the personal problems of this man and the general image of the street and society that emerges in the film are aptly portrayed. ‘The Trap’ is a film that, despite some easy plot twists, gets under the skin and makes you think.