Rabbit Trap Thrums on a Mesmerizing but Alienating Wavelength

Director Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap–his feature film debut–opens on the awe-inspiring image of a flock of thousands of starlings undulating across the sky in fantastical group acrobatics, an instantaneous bit of shorthand for the endless mystery and unknowable nature of the natural world. It’s not a piece of imagery we’ve never seen in the genre before–Jennifer Kent’s entry in Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, “The Murmuring,” literally deals with two researchers studying the grand, improvisational movements of bird flocks. What Chainey’s film is so fascinated by, on the other hand, is the implication of the title such an activity bears: “murmuration.” It’s the term for the way thousands of starlings mysteriously and ominously move together as one, but “murmur” also clearly implies a sonic meaning: Sound so low and indistinct, so primal, that it’s difficult to notice or make out. This kind of immediate cinematic play on words, focused totally around human senses, is very much on brand for Rabbit Trap, a heady mix of psychological horror, cinematic texture-building and fantastical nonsense. Destined to be divisive, it’s a piece of modestly indulgent arthouse horror that is equal parts bewitching and belabored, but at least it has the good instinct to trim itself to a short runtime that doesn’t allow it to become genuinely grating.

With that said: Rabbit Trap is one of those Skinamarink-esque experiences that essentially demands you turn yourself over to it and accept its peculiar delivery in order to receive it in the way that is intended. Viewers will find that they’re either able to tune themselves to its specific wavelength, and ultimately resonate back to such a degree that they can overlook its thin narrative and lack of clear answers … or they’ll likely find themselves resentful and bored in short order. Granted, it’s not nearly so avant garde as the actual likes of Skinamarink, a film it’s still amazing to think saw wide distribution, but it’s similarly unconcerned with any mandate to deliver conventional horror frights or popcorn entertainment.

Our setting is a remote cabin in the Welsh countryside, where urbanite husband Darcy (Dev Patel) and wife Daphne (Rosy McEwen), a pair of musicians and sonic explorers, have seemingly come to workshop Daphne’s latest album as she battles what feels like a cocktail of ennui and writer’s block. In practice, this mostly boils down to Darcy trudging through the stunningly beautiful Welsh forests and glades, recording any sound he comes into contact with, while Daphne loiters in the cabin, listening to the recordings and attempting to spark some kind of inspiration. And it all seems to be going nowhere, until Darcy encounters a fungi fairy ring in the woods that seems to emit an unearthly variety of sounds that are invisible to the naked ear, the recordings of which have an energizing effect on the moribund Daphne. A creative explosion is sparked, but another visitor appears alongside it: A mysterious, androgynous character referred to in the credits only as “The Child” (Jade Croot), who seems inexplicably drawn to both Darcy and Daphne, attempting to wedge himself/herself firmly into their lives. What follows is a psychological, quasi-horror story touching on classic folk horror motifs, faerie signifiers, disintegrating relationships, buried trauma, and a whole lot of audiophile nerdery.

In a sense, that puts Rabbit Trap in similar “aesthete horror” territory as the likes of Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio or Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor, but in comparison with those films, Bryn Chainey’s movie is less genuinely concerned with fright or even primarily evoking dis-ease or unnerving effects in its audience. Like so many Strickland features, it does channel the seductive eroticism of sound–immediately captured in Patel delicately brushing his microphones over the body of McEwen as the two recline together–but for the most part the film plays as a dreamy, philosophical rumination on both sound and the forces that draw humans together. As they recline together, Daphne states what sounds like a unifying thesis: “With your eyes, you enter the world. With your ears, the world enters you.” Darcy, on one of his many sound-collecting excursions, offers an even more navel-gazing assessment, calling sound “the invisible shadow of an energy exchange,” and following that with “When you hear a sound, you become a sound. Your body is the house that it haunts.”