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Rabbit Trap - Sundance 2025


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By: Isaac P. Ale
January 31, 2025

Dev Patel as Darcy in RABBIT TRAP Rabbit Trap [2025]

Film

You know when you're home alone and begin to hear strange, inexplicable noises. Frequencies that resemble your worst nightmares, seemingly appearing out of thin air, mirroring the isolation that breeds them. Bryn Chainey knows either too much about these otherworldly instances, or has experienced them too many times. These, along with English and Welsh folktales inspired the story behind Chainey's debut feature film, Rabbit Trap. Filled with supernatural noises--buoyed by intricate sound design--along with outrageously odd occurrences, Chainey's debut dives into the bottomless well of folk horror, quickly losing its narrative focus. While Rabbit Trap starts with an intriguing premise, it immediately loses any steam, twisting itself into a tangled homage to folk horror’s greatest hits, only to miss the mark.

In an isolated cottage in rural Wales, Darcy (Dev Patel) works as a sound engineer for his experimental musician wife Daphne (Rosy McEwen), often blaring their works in progress across the lonely Welsh landscape. While out recording the natural sounds around their cabin, Darcy stumbles across a strange warbling emanating from the nearby woods. Upon further investigation, subsequent playback, and mixing of the unordinary noise, a child (Jade Croot) appears outside their cabin, starting an eery chain of events that will haunt Darcy and Daphne forever.

For a film that's so entrenched in its understanding and representation of noise, Rabbit Trap does well to provide some extraordinary sound design. Various concoctions of mixing flutter in and out of the first act of the film while Daphne is at her most productive. While the film takes place in 1970, the couple have state-of-the-art equipment, allowing Daphne's twists and turns of mixing boards and tapes to provide some incredibly immersive and haunting experimental music.

Yet for all its sonic prowess, the film falters when it shifts from auditory horror to an unfocused pastiche of folk horror tropes when Croot's child appears. Chainey's screenplay repeatedly emphasizes the eerie notion that sound is an apparition of actions—an unsettling concept that had the potential to be deeply effective. One would expect this idea to play a pivotal role in the unraveling of Darcy and Daphne’s lives, yet it is frustratingly abandoned. But, unfortunately, Rabbit Trap cuts its main premise short, instead swerving deep into a mixture of folk horror ideas that are all as incomprehensible as the next. Strange moments occur one after another but neither do they build upon each other, nor do these events seem to have any bearing on the overall efficacy of the film. It feels as though there were too many ideas for how to make Rabbit Trap a folk horror film, without weeding through any of the weaker options.

From haunting dreams of Darcy's tormented past, the omnipotent forest spirits, or even the strange child's existence, none of these supposedly dread-building moments add to a feeling of terror, but instead serve to obfuscate the true meaning of whatever the hell is happening. Darcy clearly has trauma rooted in his father, who appears in his nightmares along with a shadowy figure, but these motifs aren't only left unexplained, but take screen time away from the horrific reality of Darcy and Daphne. Meanwhile, the child often refers to faeries and the ancient forest people, the Tylweth Teg, but the rich folktales they reference are never expanded upon. Instead leading much of Rabbit Trap into a frustrating territory of misinterpretation, or just plain confusion. For whatever redeeming qualities Rabbit Trap had in sound design, they were quickly snuffed out by the overwhelming tangle of underdeveloped ideas that unravels the very foundation of the film. Making for one confusing and often boring feature that squanders its strongest elements, leaving a film that is as frustrating as it is forgettable.

Froth

Originally I thought Rabbit Trap was going to be a real trip into a dark, aural world of horror that would shake my soul through my ears. For the first 20 minutes I was right, but it quickly devolved into the messy folk horror that I mentioned. But that doesn't detract from the beer choice I had curated prior to my viewing which is Offset Bier's Drawn to the Dark, a milk stout featuring a prominent coffee presence.

It's dark appearance is a reflection of what was supposed to be a dark and dreary adventure, while the coffee is meant to keep you awake not because I found the movie boring but because I saw it in the midnight section of Sundance. The sweet chocolate notes carry the strong coffee flavors into a beautiful marriage of taste while its overall warming properties keep you nice and cozy this winter. At 6.8% ABV it doesn't possess a real boozy presence, instead taking on an extremely smooth and medium drinking profile that makes it an easy drink, and more importantly, a delightful drink. By the time the mysterious child starts shrieking you'll be able to kick back, relax, and take a sip of this wonderful beverage while Rabbit Trap goes deeper into the dark.