Sundance 2025 Review: RABBIT TRAP, Auditory Wonders, Stunning Visuals, Abstract Narrative

Nothing, positively nothing, good comes out of purchasing a decades-old farmhouse in the middle of Wales. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

 

In Bryn Chainey’s contribution to the ever-expanding folk horror sub-genre, Rabbit Trap, Darcy (Oscar nominee Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwan), a sound recordist and an experimental/electronic music artist (imagine a cross between genre pioneers Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson), respectively, purchase said farmhouse somewhere in Wales circa 1976, ostensibly so Daphne can complete work on her latest album and Darcy, husband and chief assistant, gathers sounds from the natural and human-made world outside their farmhouse.

 

The “nothing good” part happens almost immediately: rambling through the nearby woods, Darcy crosses a mushroom circle, records strange, discordant sounds, and experiences a momentary dislocation in time. At the farmhouse, Daphne obsessively spends almost every waking moment coaxing a variety of inorganic sounds from analog synthesizers, tape decks, and even a theremin.

 

Darcy’s recordings serve as both inspiration and source/found sounds integrated into her tracks.

Those eerie sounds seem to have brought a nameless stranger (Jade Croot), to their property. The stranger looks like a teen, but sounds like an old soul connected to the natural and supernatural world, the latter predictably pagan in idea and execution.

 

The stranger’s persistent oddness or refusal to share little about his personal life, including his name, doesn’t seem to faze either Darcy or Daphne initially, suggesting they’re under a spell or curse of some kind, potentially doomed to repeat a one-sided game played by the ancient spirits who inhabit the nearby woods.

 

Whatever the cause or the rationale for their inexplicable behavior, first Darcy, then Daphne allow the stranger to ingratiate themselves into their secluded lives, offering Darcy the opportunity to play mentor or guide to the intellectually curious child and something possibly more sinister, access to secrets of an otherworldly kind to Daphne. As the stranger reappears every day, practically begging to be allowed into the farmhouse and their day-to-day activities, foreboding sets in. Darcy and Daphne’s civility, their reflexive attachment to social mores, becomes one more weakness to exploit.

 

Another, poorly integrated, underwritten subplot involves Darcy and a recurring nightmare of a horrific, naked figure approaching him while he lies immobile, unable to either speak or scream. It hints not just of an unfortunate history of night terrors, but of an abusive past. Hoping to create an uncrossable chasm between the couple, the manipulative stranger turns that history against Darcy, describing him as irrevocably “tainted” and thus somehow unworthy of Daphne’s love or affection.

 

Filled with gorgeous lensing and compositions courtesy of Chainey and his cinematographer, Andreas Johannessen, Graham Reznick’s meticulously crafted sound design, and Lucretia Dalt’s perfectly modulated score, Rabbit Trap has few scares or shocks, relying instead on mood, atmosphere, and ambiguity to convey the physical, emotional, and psychological dangers Darcy and Daphne face as the nameless stranger insinuates himself into their lives. Questions are either never answered nor never asked.

 

All that ambiguity, however, tends to have an immediate and long-term downside. It can leave the audience perplexed, confounded, and ultimately, left with a feeling of hollowness or vague dissatisfaction. 

 

Still, Chainey’s talents and skill as a filmmaker isn’t debatable. Far from it. They’re present in every frame. An imaginative, inspired premise given depth and nuance by Patel and McEwan as a fraying, fraught couple, and Croot, memorablly disquieting as the nameless stranger, also help immeasurably, of course, but a premise, whatever its appeals, can only take a filmmaker and an audience so far.

 

Here, Chainey’s sometimes admirable, sometimes stubborn, preference for ambiguity bordering on abstraction leaves the audience looking deep into the abyss. Unfortunately, nothing looks back.