There’s something funny about Rabbit Trap: it might be one of the few horror films I’d recommend watching at home through headphones. Not because it isn’t cinematic (in fact, some of its images are jaw-dropping) but because sound is the real star here, and the film knows it. The uneasiness seeps into your ears, crawls down your spine, and suddenly, you’re in the same unsettled headspace as the characters. In theaters, the effect would be overwhelming in a different way, but in headphones, it almost feels like the movie is inside you.
That soundscape alone makes Bryn Chainey’s debut worth attention. In Rabbit Trap, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play Darcy and Daphne, a couple of musicians retreating to the Welsh countryside in search of inspiration. Their dynamic feels warm but strained, two artists trying to align their visions while navigating the unspoken weight of their relationship.
Early on, Chainey positions their creative process as a mirror for the supernatural: recording ambient noises, warping them into music, and playing with tones that seem to reverberate with something lurking just outside the walls. It’s a setup tailor-made for horror, a genre that thrives on isolation. Fog-shrouded hills, ancient woodlands, and weathered stone cottages become the canvas, each corner suggesting secrets and half-remembered stories. When a mysterious child drifts into their lives (Jade Croot), the couple is pulled deeper into something stranger—a folkloric nightmare that hints at faerie circles, woodland spirits, and the kind of superstitions that cling to the land long after they’ve been spoken.
But while the ingredients are all here, Rabbit Trap doesn’t always know what to cook with them. Horror often lives and dies by tension, and Chainey has a habit of skipping the simmer for the boil. The film jumps from hushed unease to loud shocks without always earning the escalation. More frustrating is its reluctance to fully commit to its mythology.
For every moment where the folklore feels tantalizingly close—an uncanny ritual, a child’s cryptic behavior, a melody that seems older than the characters themselves—the film hedges with ambiguity. Symbolism piles on, but meaning doesn’t always follow. Sometimes it feels like you’d need a working knowledge of Welsh myth to decode the ending, and even then, I suspect some viewers will leave scratching their heads.
What remains consistently is the craft. Patel and McEwen are remarkably natural together, selling both the intimacy and the fractures of their partnership. Their performances root the film in emotional reality even when the narrative veers into abstraction. Croot, meanwhile, is magnetic. She carries the slippery energy of folkloric children, and the film is at its strongest when she’s on screen, her presence destabilizing the couple’s sense of safety.
Technically, the film excels. Chainey knows how to wield the camera for dread. The forest skyline glows with slashes of impossible light, shadows ripple in ways the eye doesn’t trust, and interiors are framed like traps themselves. But it’s the sound design that steals the show. Creaking floors, breath against a microphone, an off-kilter hum. The entire soundscape seems alive.
As Darcy and Daphne manipulate their recordings, the line between music and haunting grows indistinct. The result is deeply sensory, more invasive than visual scares ever could be. Watching with headphones only amplifies the effect: the sound doesn’t just accompany the horror, it becomes the horror.
And yet, all that craft circles back to the same stumbling block: story. The best folk horrors (The Wicker Man, The Witch, Midsommar) root their strangeness in character psychology or cultural critique. Chainey gestures toward that depth but doesn’t fully arrive. There are faint ideas about artistic creation, parenthood, and how the act of listening can both reveal and endanger. But the themes never crystallize, leaving the film more evocative than cohesive.
Rabbit Trap doesn’t spoon-feed its mythology, and in the right mood, its obliqueness feels appropriately uncanny. Horror, after all, is often most effective when it resists clarity. But here, the refusal to commit risks disengagement. You may leave more impressed by textures than by the tale they’re meant to tell. In the end, what lingers are impressions: Patel and McEwen experimenting with sound in their cottage, Croot’s eerie half-smile, a sudden fracture of light through trees.
As a debut, it’s bursting with confidence and craft, announcing Chainey as a director with immense potential. But potential is the keyword. The ideas outpace the execution. Rabbit Trap wants to haunt you with sound and suggestion, and sometimes it does. Other times, it feels like you’re just hearing noise.
Review Courtesy of Jake Fittipaldi
Feature Image from Magnet Releasing
Recent Comments