Rabbit Trap, 2025.
Written and Directed by Bryn Chainey.
Starring Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, Jade Croot, and Nicholas Sampson.
SYNOPSIS:
Married couple Daphne and Darcy Davenport are two musicians who moved from London to a cottage in Wales to complete their new album. By accident they record a mystical sound never heard before and gradually disconnect from reality.
Writer/director Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap is deeply and abstractly rooted in Welsh folklore to such a degree that anyone who doesn’t have some working knowledge of Tylwyth Teg fairy rings will be utterly lost. It is both dumbfounding and tediously frustrating, yet also undeniably alluring due to its trippy sound design, score (by Lucrecia Dalt), and visuals (shot by Andreas Johannessen).
Set in the countryside during the 1970s, the film focuses on the married couple of Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen), who isolate themselves to work on their next album. Appropriately, the music is as strange as the rest of the story, incorporating earthly sounds into the mix. That means that Darcy spends much of the time walking around the lush land with a recording device, searching for any sounds they might deem usable. Unsurprisingly, this approach works well for the movie itself, creating a calming ASMR vibe at times, while occasionally shifting to scenes featuring more unsettling sounds, including a retro computer screen displaying soundwave movements accompanied by ominous narration about the relationship between them and the human body.
All the while, Darcy is evidently weary and downbeat. His relationship with his wife is mostly fine, but there is also something weighing on his conscience. Such past traumas vaguely come to the forefront of the story, as Darcy also inadvertently disturbs the fairy world while wandering the forests, which brings into this realm a creepy boy credited as The Child. This child briefly attempts to explain the fairy world (the keyword is ‘attempt,’ because there still isn’t a sensible way to do so, other than the implication that Darcy recorded a sound he wasn’t meant to). With no family or anywhere else to go, he eerily worms his way into the couple’s life. At times, he becomes increasingly unnerving and persistent, even when his presence has worn out its welcome due to broken boundaries. Of the few activities Darcy and The Child do get around to, one of them involves setting animal traps, which, in turn, brings a metaphorical rabbit into the story.
With that said, Parts of the film function as a hallucinogenic freakout for Darcy, and one that is admirable in terms of craftsmanship (the scenery is pleasant to take in), but mostly leaves one checked out because, in its inaccessibility, there is nothing else to engage with narratively. Even with an excellently internalized and tortured performance from Dev Patel and a truly odd performance from Jade Croot that switches from mannered to disturbed almost instantaneously, these are not necessarily compelling characters.
The problem with Rabbit Trap isn’t that it’s abstract; it’s that there is no absorbing pull to what is, ultimately, an intentionally muddled story about trauma that fails to capitalize on its distinct sound, music, or folkloric ideas. Even at only 87 minutes, it starts to feel as if there is no escape in sight.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
