Rabbit Trap Review

Judging purely by scale, Rabbit Trap could have been made during the depths of the COVID pandemic. Set on an isolated Welsh hillside that gives way to a dense and disorienting forest pushes thoughts of the wider world out of your mind. The cast consists of just four people, one of whom is relegated to the dream-realm and is rarely glimpsed in full; he’s credited as simply The Shadow (Nicholas Sampson), after all. To further cut them off from society, the story unfolds in 1973, rendering their lack of phones very plausible, while also adding to the ever-expanding list of films made in the smartphone era that find some way to pull them from their subjects’ hands.

Not that it would have mattered much. Darcy and Daphne Davenport (Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen) just moved here, and there’s nary a mention of another soul nearby. So who exactly would they have been able to ask about the strange sounds coming from the woods? That seclusion makes it especially odd when an unnamed child (Jade Croot) appears in the long grass, staring at their house, seemingly bored and craving companionship. He becomes obsessed with the couple, rapping on their door early in the morning, refusing to leave by citing Darcy’s invitation to “Come by any time.” The child’s presence isn’t made any more comforting by Croot’s striking resemblance to a young Barry Keoghan, complete with glassy, gray-green eyes that make your blood run cold as his casual gaze pierces deep into your soul.

But the Davenports are a proper English couple, and follow the time-honored English tradition of being polite to a fault. The child literally counts the number of times Darcy says “Sorry” in their initial meeting, and their every interaction is directed by his refusal to adhere to the social contract and their insistence on it. The first chunk of the film is defined by discomfort. Much of it comes from that mismatch of manners, mixed with a child’s lack of understanding or acceptance of rules. But slowly, like a frog in a boiling pot, you become more and more confident that your assessment of the child’s nature is accurate. That his presence is menacing, even before you glean to what end. For much of the film, all exist in a soup of subtext that encourages you to dig for connections, yielding occasional revelations but leaving you wondering “…then what?”

Rabbit Trap desperately wants to be a modern folk horror, leaning hard into implication and abstraction and the surreal in order to deny you any easy answers. But far too much of what it introduces never pays off, or resolves unsatisfactorily. While I love the choice to make Daphne an experimental/drone musician, as it leads to a killer score that intensifies the otherworldly haunting to which they’re being subjected, the Davenports’ resulting fixation on sound and recording only ever plays a superficial role in the plot. The child’s comments about a previous owner’s actions to protect against local spirits go nowhere. Most crucially, despite writer/director Bryn Chainey making a meal out of the child’s lesson on how to set a rabbit trap (“give it something it really wants, and mean it”), and the audience consequently applying it to multiple plot threads, the script forgets to do anything with all but the most overt one. It’s as if Chainey was rushed, and in an attempt to preserve the pace of the movie, sacrificed large chunks of the script.

Until the disappointment of the ending, that ends up being an understandable trade-off. Sure, there are some awkward lines and frustrating character decisions, none of which are compensated by Patel and McEwen giving good but not great performances. But the aesthetics are immaculate. The sound design is as fantastic as you’d demand from a movie about a musician and sound engineer. Darcy’s sleep paralysis-induced dreams are suitably unsettling, as are the handful of encounters in the woods. Croot’s presence is the film’s most potent weapon, disrupting their new life before they can begin to settle in. The landscapes (both constructed and natural) are gorgeous, and we feel the awesome power of nature during an especially anxiety-inducing sequence that separates the couple. Lucie Red’s production design is an integral part of realizing a complete makeover of the one of the sets late in the film, and she (and her team) did a wonderful job of blending the real environment with elements that feel somehow…wrong.

The triumph of its craft makes it all the more disappointing that the plot leaves you so empty. Rabbit Trap refuses to string us along, instead withholding nearly every dollop of intrigue that would keep us engaged with the narrative while hinting at a mysterious world that will reveal itself to us if we just look a little harder. So when the movie reaches its eventual endgame, no further insight is gained, and no additional connections are made. It should go without saying that a film can be successful without harboring such concerns. It can even succeed when it withholds them entirely, as long as it’s careful to position the audience to discover them upon further reflection. But Rabbit Trap lands in a middle ground, where the few that are literalized strongly gesture towards a deeper meaning permeating the story, yet simultaneously resist acting as a Rosetta Stone for the rest of the narrative. Chainey’s debut feature successfully gives us what we wanted, but fails to mean it.