Cover Your Ears, Not Your Eyes for Welsh Folk Horror Rabbit Trap

Film Reviews

Sundance Film Review: Rabbit Trap
Director: Bryn Chainey
SpectreVision, Align, Bankside Films
Premiere: 01.24

I believe that truly sinister, unsettling, skin-crawling horror comes not from what the audience sees, but from what they hear. Alien, Eraserhead and Nope are all terrifying films that would have collapsed into a laughable pile of nothing without extraordinary sound design and music composition. Director Bryn Chainey uses this knowledge to its full potential in his feature debut Rabbit Trap, though the film’s captivating, eerie atmosphere and thematic emphasis on sound mask a vague narrative and distant characters. 

Like all good fairy tales, Rabbit Trap evokes the feeling that it could be happening at any point in time, but in this case, only in one possible location. Set in the isolated Welsh countryside with only three characters, the deep, cavernous forest — and the rich mythology that inhabits it — is a breathing, aching character in itself. However, the analog tape recorders, oscillators and synthesizers belonging to experimental electronic musician Daphne (Rosy McEwen, Blue Jean) are the only evidence that the story takes place in 1976 and not, say, the 14th century. 

Daphne is working on her next album with the help of her inexplicably tortured husband Darcy (Dev Patel, The Green Knight, Slumdog Millionaire), who takes field recordings of birds, water, wind and anything else he can find. Unable to talk about some painful event from his childhood, Darcy is haunted by persistent night terrors in which a large, gruesome man pushes down on his chest. At this point, the film could have explored how trauma is magnified by silence and what it means to speak a repressed memory into existence, but instead it chooses to keep things abstract and dead-ended. 

In the interest of maintaining the forest’s mysteries, Chainey deliberately keeps the audience at arm’s length from the couple, obscuring their history, motivations and desires. When a rabbit-trapping child (Jade Croot, The Machine) appears on their doorstep and begins interfering with their lives, I prepared for an allegory about parenthood — though this theme gets muddled rather quickly, and it’s unclear whether or not Daphne and Darcy even wanted to be parents before their lives ran amok. The nameless child of indeterminate age and gender brings them closer to Annwn, the ancient otherworld where malevolent fairies called Tylwyth Teg live, and drives the pair away from each other in the process. Croot looks and sounds exactly like Barry Keoghan in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and her evolution from a charming, quirky lad into a demanding, unforgiving creature is incredible to watch. 

However, composer Lucrecia Dalt and sound designer Graham Reznick are by far the biggest stars of Rabbit Trap. The humming, droning ambient noise and unnerving loops of garbled fairy chatter reverberated in my bones, creating high stakes when there were little to begin with. Chainey cited musical inspiration from early British pioneers of electronic music Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, whose influences are evident in the endless waves and echos that make the forest sigh and tingle. I don’t doubt that the haunting Welsh lullaby sung by Croot and McEwen left the entire audience with goosebumps, too. 

Through cryptic, roundabout prose, the child implies that rabbits are spiritual messengers, tunneling back and forth between the earth and the underworld. When Darcy fails to properly skin a rabbit that was gifted to him by the child, instead letting it bleed out and start to rot in the kitchen sink, the child explodes with rage and holds a ritualistic funeral under a sad-looking tree. The film’s themes of unnatural transformations and the relationship between humanity and nature felt like a half-fleshed-out Jeff VanderMeer story, though one that didn’t spook me nearly as much as his novel Annihilation

Rabbit Trap is full of things to say about the symbolism of sound: “With your eyes, you enter the world. With your ears, the world enters you.” “Noise is the oldest of gods. Before language. Before flesh.” “When you hear a sound, you become its home. Your body is the house it haunts.” Unfortunately, these pithy, profound statements don’t make up for the unanswered questions about why Daphne and Darcy behave the way they do. Still, if you do see Rabbit Trap, hear it in a theater with a good sound system where you can enjoy its full-bodied rumble. —Asha Pruitt

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.