‘Rabbit Trap’: Sundance Review

Dir: Bryn Chainey. UK. 2025. 88 mins.

Those raised on folklore about foundlings and fairies will find much to enjoy in this debut from Bryn Chainey. The British director marries Welsh mythology to more modern ideas about processing trauma, using sound to create a strange and unsettling psychological mood piece rather than an out-and-out horror. The result is engagingly enigmatic if slight in terms of plot and light on chills.

Enigmatic

While the British and Irish folk horror market is an increasingly crowded one, the fact Rabbit Trap was co-produced by Elijah Wood’s Spectrevision plus the presence of Dev Patel and Screen Star of Tomorrow Rosy McEwen (Blue Jean) in the cast could help it catch the attention of distributors following its premiere in Sundance’s Midnight strand.

It’s 1976 and experimental electro musician Daphne (McEwen) and her husband Darcy (Patel) have moved to rural Wales (played with ancient and wild beauty by North Yorkshire). There she spends her days creating sounds in a makeshift music lab, complete with oscilloscope and theremin. “With your eyes you enter the world,” she tells her husband, “With your ears, it enters you”. There are a lot of strong and evocative lines like this in the script, but the character drawing is less successful, with Chainey relying heavily on his cast to bring home the psychological bacon.

Darcy is Daphne’s helpmate, wandering the moors and woodland recording ambient sounds for her to use in her work. An early striking image shows a murmuration of birds creating waves in the sky like a natural oscilloscope as Darcy captures their sound below. After dark, however, Darcy produces eerie noises of his own as night terrors see him visited by a monstrous figure (Nicholas Sampson).

Though the soundscape created by composer Lucrecia Dalt and sound designer Graham Reznick is a rich one, with its electro bleeps and rumbles married to more natural ambient sounds, it’s the visuals that are frequently more arresting thanks to the detailed production design from Lucie Red.

When, one day, Darcy begins to record a strange noise out in the woodland, he stumbles into a fairy circle of mushrooms. Later after, he plays the music to Daphne, the visuals become as distorted as the sound, which appears to trigger the appearance of an androgynous unnamed teenager (Jade Croot). There’s something wild and ethereal about this child, who quickly ingratiates himself into the couple’s lives.

He talks of the Welsh fairies - the tylwyth teg - and those in the know about their often treacherous dealings with humans will immediately be wary. Though initially Daphne and Darcy feel protective of the youngster - there’s no doubt he is filling a gap of some sort, although specifics are left unspoken - his increasingly possessive attitude towards Daphne begins to cause friction. Croot’s watchful delivery becomes unsettling, with the child’s repeated question, “are you scared of me?” taking on an increasingly unnerving vibe.

There is a rabbit trap set by the child but Chainey is more concerned with the mental snares that Darcy is caught up in. Patel sells his damaged character well and the chemistry between him and McEwen is impressively charged. The plot, however, is torn between the strange child and Darcy’s backstory, with the two muddling along together rather than coalescing. The pacing is also uneven, arriving in fits and starts, so that developments happen in a rush, particularly in the final act, when the natural world begins to make itself felt in increasingly unnatural ways.

Chainey doesn’t want to make us jump or frighten us away. Instead he wants to invite us into the rich and strange world he has created, and audiences hungry for immersive mystery that defies resolution will be the most likely to step willingly into his trap.