There are several moments in Rabbit Trap when the boundaries between sound and space, dream and reality, begin to fray. Sound is not merely an element of the film’s atmosphere — it is its driving force, the unseen terror pressing in on the psyche of its characters. Bryn Chainey’s debut feature is a folk horror film, an erotic thriller, and an experimental meditation on the relationship between perception, memory, and fear. At its core, Rabbit Trap explores the eerie interplay between human connection, artistic obsession, and nature’s ability to resist control.
‘Rabbit Trap’ Is a Sonic Descent Into the Uncanny
Rabbit Trap
4
/5
- Release Date
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January 24, 2025
- Runtime
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97 Minutes
- Director
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Bryn Chainey
- Writers
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Bryn Chainey
- Producers
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Daniel Noah, Elijah Wood, Adrian Politowski, Lawrence Inglee, Nadia Khamlichi, Dev Patel, Elisa Lleras, Martin Metz, Alex Ashworth, Sean Marley, Stephen Kelliher, Sierra Garcia, Kyle Stroud, Sophie Green, Nessa McGill
Cast
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Rosy McEwen
Daphne Davenport
- Uses sound as both a storytelling device and a source of existential dread, creating an immersive atmosphere.
- Both leads bring layers of emotional depth, making the film as much about their marriage as it is about the supernatural.
- Merges the sensual with the terrifying, exploring the intersection of fear, desire, and artistic obsession.
- The tension builds gradually, which may not suit audiences looking for a more immediate sense of horror.
- Those expecting clear supernatural explanations or jump scares may find its ambiguity unsettling rather than satisfying.
Set in 1976 Wales, Rabbit Trap follows Daphne (Rosy McEwen, of the masterpiece Blue Jean), an experimental musician, and her emotionally withdrawn husband, Darcy (Dev Patel). Darcy is a field recording artist who spends his days capturing the landscape’s raw, unfiltered sounds. He collects recordings from the neighboring woods but seems disinterested in everything else, retreating further into his own mind. Daphne, on the other hand, distorts and manipulates these recordings, crafting eerie, avant-garde compositions. Their creative dynamic appears symbiotic — until an uninvited guest, a strange young rabbit trapper (Jade Croot), disrupts their fragile peace.
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The child inserts themself into the couple’s daily existence with an unnerving sense of ownership over both the land and their lives. The child’s presence is inexplicable yet inescapable, not a ghost but something far more terrifying — an enfant terrible whose innocence is a mere façade for something manipulative, perhaps even supernatural. They speaks in riddles: “If you catch the rabbit, you catch the message.” What message? What rabbit? In Rabbit Trap, meaning is elusive, fear is instinctual, and sound is an unrelenting force that’s both creative and destructive.
‘Blow Out’ Meets ‘Berberian Sound Studio’: A Cinematic Lineage of Sonic Horror
From its opening frames, Rabbit Trap establishes itself within the tradition of sonic horror — films that use sound as both a weapon and a portal to the subconscious. Chainey draws from the sonic paranoia of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and the psychotic auditory collapse of Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012), where recording technology becomes an extension of madness. The film also bears the unnerving tonal precision of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and its sense that everything is slightly off-kilter, that the world has been tilted just a degree beyond natural.
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Lucrecia Dalt’s experimental score reinforces this sense of unease, blending electronic murmurs with organic textures, distorting reality through sound. In a particularly unnerving sequence, vocal waves appear on the screen, their distortions shaping the atmosphere more effectively than any visual jump scare. Sound becomes not just a thematic tool, but the very architecture of fear.
This approach also allows Rabbit Trap to lean into something rare within horror — a sensorial eroticism. Daphne’s fascination with sound manifests as something almost sensual; the more distorted and unsettling the world around them becomes, the more she is drawn to it, aroused by the collapse of order. Darcy, meanwhile, is slowly unraveled by it, his own subconscious spilling into the surrounding environment. Their relationship does not erode in the face of terror; instead, it mutates, shifting into something primal and unspoken.
The Enfant Terrible Trope: A Child as a Harbinger of Psychological Decay
Horror cinema has long relied on unsettling child figures, but Rabbit Trap resists the trope of the demonic or ghostly child and instead embraces the enfant terrible archetype. The child’s presence is an active disruption of the adult world, exposing the characters’ fears, weaknesses, and hidden desires.
The rabbit trapper is not simply eerie — the child is self-assured, dominant, and oddly wise beyond the years they exist in. Rather than terrorizing Darcy and Daphne outright, the child exerts control over them in quieter, more insidious ways, shifting the power dynamics of the household. The child is both an extension of the land and an agent of disorder, bending the couple’s will until they no longer seem to belong to themselves. The way the child speaks and moves suggests that they know something they shouldn’t. Like the rabbit caught in a trap, Daphne and Darcy become ensnared by their own entanglement with nature, with their past, with themselves.
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The Haunting of the Body, The Haunting of the Mind
Much of the film’s horror stems from the idea that your body is a haunted house. The past lives within you, shaping every breath, every sound you make. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Darcy sleepwalks, whispering fragments of a childhood memory, a moment of trauma that has remained dormant, waiting to be unearthed. The more the couple engages with the strange, sonic disturbances around them, the more their own memories bleed into the present.
This collapse of time and identity is distinctly present in the film’s cinematography, which shifts from grounded naturalism to dreamlike abstraction. Shadows stretch unnaturally. Light flickers between the trees. The presence of the rabbit — the film’s central metaphor — becomes more and more pronounced, its significance left deliberately ambiguous. Killing a rabbit, after all, sounds like a spell.
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At its core, Rabbit Trap is about connections — between people, between past and present, between humans and the natural world. The couple’s artistic process mirrors the film’s themes: Darcy records sound, attempting to capture reality as it is, while Daphne distorts it, shaping it into something new, something unrecognizable. Their relationship is an extension of this same tension, the desire to preserve versus the urge to transform.
Ambiguity and Secrecy Obfuscate the Horror
Rabbit Trap is not a film about what is seen, but what is heard, what lingers, distorts, and reverberates in the silence. It is a horror film that refuses easy answers, a study of a marriage that unravels in the wake of an unknowable force. Chainey’s debut is an experiment in psychological decay, a meditation on how we project our own fears onto the unknown. The ambiguity involved (and the slow-burn nature of the film) may annoy horror fans more than please them; it’s an arthouse horror movie, after all.
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Like the best horror films, Rabbit Trap leaves the audience with more questions than answers — not about its plot, but about themselves. It does not demand comprehension. It demands surrender. Rabbit Trap premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Watch this space for updates about its release.
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