“With your eyes you enter the world, with your ears the world enters you,” says Daphne (Rosy McEwen), an experimental music artist who has moved into a cottage deep in the Welsh countryside with her husband, Darcy (Dev Patel). It’s just one of the many poetic, if vaguely ambiguous, lines of dialogue in Rabbit Trap, a technically outstanding but stubbornly cryptic folk horror mood piece that uses vague ambiguity as its primary currency.
Director Bryn Chainey spends much of his first-ever feature film circling a promising theme that we’re pretty sure has something to do with sound being a primordial means by which to excavate hidden trauma from a troubled soul. However, his thesis suffocates underneath a frustrating refusal to drop enough crumbs to keep us invested in both the characters and in deducing the larger point Chainey is making. What we’re left with, however, is so captivating to look at, and listen to, that had Chainey been a little less opaque, Rabbit Trap would have been more than just a calling card film from a promising director.
Working with cinematographer Andreas Johannessen, Chainey gently plants us in a gorgeous Welsh environment that evokes a rich and lush Celtic fairy tale. He cleverly sets his story in 1976, a pre-digital world where the record needles, the old school stereo knobs and the frayed edges of the albums in Darcy’s collection add a tactile feel that’s warm yet slightly mysterious. But even with the evocative visuals, Chainey is less interested in what Daphne and Darcy see and touch than in what they hear. Darcy roams about the Celtic moors with his audio equipment, recording the fundamental sounds of earth and sky, which he takes back to Daphne for possible use in her experimental music. Like most of the information conveyed here, Chainey provides only the slightest of hints about the state of Daphne and Darcy’s marriage. Neither one discusses their lack of children, an option that may be off the table thanks to Darcy’s recurring nightmare that gestures towards the possibility that he was abused as a child.
Lots of Questions, Not Many Answers
Rabbit Trap
2.5
/5
- Release Date
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January 24, 2025
- Runtime
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97 Minutes
- Director
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Bryn Chainey
- Writers
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Bryn Chainey
- Producers
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Daniel Noah, Elijah Wood, Adrian Politowski, Lawrence Inglee, Nadia Khamlichi, Dev Patel, Elisa Lleras, Martin Metz, Alex Ashworth, Sean Marley, Stephen Kelliher, Sierra Garcia, Kyle Stroud, Sophie Green, Nessa McGill
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Rosy McEwen
Daphne Davenport
Indeed, Rabbit Trap is so full of unresolved hints and gestures that we wonder if Chainey really has a handle on how they fit together, or if his thematic reach just exceeded his storytelling grasp. The genre he’s working in is essentially folk horror, though he leans on the former much more than the latter. This comes into creepy focus after Darcy steps into a circle of mushrooms and passes out. Soon after, he meets a mysterious, nameless and genderless 12-year-old (the skin-crawlingly effective actress Jade Croot, cosplaying an elfin Barry Keoghan) who looks sprung from Middle-Earth. The child slowly and stealthily integrates into Daphne and Darcy’s marriage, showing up daily, taking long walks with Darcy and having her face painted by Daphne. Soon, the child’s behavior becomes more ominous and passive-aggressively threatening; he warns the couple about evil faeries, kills a rabbit as tribute and picks at the scab of their childless marriage by calling Daphne “mom.”
While this is certainly a unique way for Darcy to overcome the primary obstacle the story has set out for him, it’s not the cleanest, and waiting for clues becomes almost tiresome. Daphne and Darcy never ask the child the most basic questions about its identity, which would have been fine had Chainey chosen to sacrifice character logic in the service of delivering a big thematic knockout. But his storytelling is so obtuse and his characters are so lacking in definition that the dots struggle to connect. Only during the film’s devastating final shot are we forced to reconsider everything that came before it.
Another thing Rabbit Trap lacks is scares, which, as it turns out, is one of Chainey’s smarter choices. The world he has created is highly intoxicating and leaning into jump scares, jump cuts and stingers would only break such a meticulously crafted spell.
Sound as a Character
Rabbit Trap is ostensibly a film with only three characters, but there is actually a fourth: sound. Sound designer Graham Reznick and composer Lucrecia Dalt create an astonishingly effective aural environment that needs to be experienced either in a theater with an appropriately decked-out sound system or at home on quality headphones. These sounds, sometimes subtle, sometimes punishing, move Daphne and Darcy’s arcs forward as much as the dialogue does. It’s the primary way in which they express their desire, as when Darcy runs his microphone over his wife’s body as a way to connect with her on an almost primal level. The meticulous sound mix also provides clever clues to a character’s inner state; the rain pours down when the child begs Daphne and Darcy to give it a name. But it’s not really the child pleading to be named; it’s Darcy’s silent, buried trauma that is in desperate need of articulation.
Chainey’s insistence on ambiguity requires actors who can keep us tethered to their characters, lest the whole thing devolve into an exercise in style. Patel and especially McEwen (so good in 2022’s Blue Jean) subtly manipulate their bodies and their facial expressions to best ensure that Darcy and Daphne read as people, not constructs. But there’s only so much they can do during the final stretch, when Chainey overestimates how far he can push the symbolism before the audience, instead of considering what it all means, considers checking out instead.
Rabbit Trap has atmosphere and style to spare, and Chainey is a director to watch. In the end, he tries too hard, and yet not hard enough, to give meaning to lines like, “When you hear a sound, you become its home. Your body is the house it haunts.” But he does have a point: Our trauma is inside of us. We just have to listen for it.
Rabbit Trap, from Magnet Releasing, opens in theaters September 12
