Bryn Chainey’s stylish first feature arrives with the commendable swagger of a debut that knows exactly how it wants to feel.
Set in the Welsh countryside in 1976, Rabbit Trap follows Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne (Rosy McEwen), married audio engineers who retreat to a remote farmhouse to record the evocative noises of the natural world: wind whistling through grass, mud sucking at boots, birds cawing through the grey sky.
Their tender relationship is defined by shared artistry and a gentle romantic intimacy. Darcy runs microphones over Daphne’s skin, wherein sound becomes foreplay and a cutesy visual.
That fragile harmony fractures with the arrival of a strange local boy, played with menace and charm by Jade Croot. His eerie introversion recalls Barry Keoghan in The Killing of a Sacred Deer; his neediness echoes David Bradley’s poignance at the heart of Ken Loach’s Kes.
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He drifts into their lives bearing folk tales, dead rabbits and an unsettling insistence on physical closeness.
Chainey refuses to explain what the boy represents, leaving a deliberate absence at the film’s dark and mythical core. He could be a changeling (a supernatural consequence of trespassing into fairy territory) or the spectral stand-in for a child the couple lost, or never allowed themselves to want.
The ambiguity is intriguing, but it also blunts the drama, especially as the boy’s presence grows more persistent.
For a film so aurally attuned – Graham Reznick’s sound design is as immersive as it is unsettling – Rabbit Trap struggles to translate its ideas visually. Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre mined adjacent lupine mythology far more effectively.
The blood, bone and animal flesh that should unsettle rarely make an impact. Reactions, even from such an accomplished cast, are strangely muted; implication replaces escalation.
Chainey is on to something with his ideas of Freudian repression, Celtic folklore and burial. Unhappily, the film states these themes so insistently – through portentous dialogue and mythic whispering – that they begin to feel both underwritten and overwritten at once.
Technically, Rabbit Trap is assured, particularly in its use of analogue equipment and dense sound design. Emotionally, though, it remains curiously hollow. For all its craft and atmosphere, this is folk horror that makes the ears twitch yet rarely raises goosebumps.
In cinemas from Friday, January 30th
