Bryn Chainey’s feature debut, the Celtic folk horror Rabbit Trap, begins with an otherworldly voice,“With your eyes, you enter the world. With your ears, the world enters you. It is immediately followed by an aural barrage, a controlled chaos orchestrated by Daphne (Rosy McEwen), an influential musician whose music combines sounds you might find in nature with those manufactured by man. She and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) have escaped to the Welsh countryside to develop their next album in solitude.
From the outset, Chainey establishes a unique use of sound to create bonds of intimacy, and as doorways to something dark and supernatural. Composer Lucrecia Dalt and sound designer Graham Reznick create a deafening abyss, pulling us into Daphne and Darcy’s collaborative undertaking. She is the star of this musical act, while he roams the natural world with his boom mic picking up new sounds for her to incorporate. It’s a partnership that works, both creatively and romantically. The passion put into their music is then expressed physically. However, when Darcy picks up a “sublime”, ethereal new sound it opens them up to something unexplainable. He wanders unknowingly into a fairy circle and it’s like stepping into another realm.
Shortly thereafter, a mysterious child (Jade Croot) begins watching their home, drawn to the music. Rabbit Trap starts getting really weird here, but also compelling as Darcy and Daphne deal with this strange kid, who they refer to as a boy but is more androgynous than that. The enigmatic child has a deceptive charm and chilling aura of Barry Keoghan, winning the couple over with knowledge of the area, weird gifts, and words of praise. He is particularly drawn to Daphne, who willingly offers up information about herself while the child remains evasive. Meanwhile, he shows Darcy how to trap rabbits while ominously stating the best way to do it is to offer the prey something it dearly wants.
The first hour of Rabbit Trap is compelling, as the youth worms his way further into Darcy and Daphne’s lives, exposing small cracks in their relationship. Darcy’s frequent night terrors are a source of tension, but go relatively unexplained, like so much does. As the boy becomes more aggressive and the couple’s parental instincts are challenged, the film becomes increasingly vague, any tension that had been conjured up evaporating like mist over the rolling hills.
Chainey bewitches you with an aural and visual marvel that would have benefited from a more cohesive story. While Patel is good as the paranoid Darcy, and McEwen brings an earthy spirit to her performance as Daphne, it’s Croot who astounds as one of the creepiest children to grace a horror film in recent years. Rabbit Trap has the makings of a great, stalker-ish horror movie with folklore influences, but Chainey plays it too close to the vest, too cryptic to be satisfying.
