In the Welsh folk-horror “Rabbit Trap,” debuting director Bryn Chainey creates an disquieting acoustic atmosphere and guides his trio of actors to powerful performances. However, these flourishes serve a muddled piece that coasts on its interpretability alone. Its dramatic mechanics and aesthetics never quite coalesce into something appropriately visceral, spiritual, or meaningful, despite the story’s frequent symbolism.
The film, debuting at Sundance, comes front-loaded with intrigue. Married couple Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne (Rosy McEwen) live in relative isolation in the Welsh countryside. The year is 1976, and their home is filled, wall to wall, with analog audio equipment. Daphne uses it to create her avant-garde music, born of the noises Darcy records with his boom mic while out on winding strolls. However, when a bizarre signal he can’t explain draws him to a circle of mushrooms in the woods — a “fairy circle” in Welsh folklore — a mysterious, anonymous,and androgynous stranger (Jade Croot) ends up at their doorstep, claiming to have been drawn to Daphne’s music from afar.
Even those unfamiliar with Welsh folk tales will likely clock the premise early on, in part because of an eerie audio recording that functions as the movie’s prologue, but also because Croot is downright eerie in her attempts to befriend the kindly couple. Her character — whose name they never seem to ask, but who they refer to as a boy — likely has some connection to the tylwyth teg, or Welsh folk fairies, who create fairy circles and covet children, leaving changelings in their place. The key wrinkle, however, is that Daphne and Darcy don’t have kids, inverting what Croot’s boyish character represents for them.
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This character walk a fine line between naïve and pushy, but he soon crosses that boundary when he playfully broaches the subject of Daphne pretending to be his mother. The couple never overtly discuss having children (or whether such a thing is in their future), but parental anxieties loom over much of the story. Darcy’s paralyzing nightmares of his father turn him into a sleepless, paranoid husk. Daphne’s calm betrays a subdued melancholy, as though something in her life were missing — which she might even be searching for through her artistry. The duo are personable and share a cutesy romantic dynamic, but that proves immediately fragile as soon as Croot enters the fray, bringing an otherworldly energy that channels the withdrawn, monotone allure of Barry Keoghan in “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.”
“Rabbit Trap” never comes out and explains the lingering hole at the center of Daphne and Darcy’s marriage. It therefore exposes itself to interpretations of whether the mysterious boy might be some spiritual embodiment of a phantom future forgotten somewhere in their past, standing in for a child the couple might’ve lost — or decided to never have. Then again, perhaps even gesturing towards this explanation might have helped the movie’s drama come together more precisely, particularly once the boy begins imposing on them.
While the aforementioned scenes of Darcy collecting ambient sounds are a worthwhile introduction (à la “Upstream Color”), the film’s acoustic curiosities seldom translate visually. The boy, for instance, is a rabbit trapper who insists upon gifting his new parental stand-ins with his catch, whether they like it or not. They’re none too pleased, but the blood and bone of it all is never quite unnerving, and rare are the moments that the movie holds on an insert of something chilling, or even a reaction shot of Daphne or Darcy responding in terror — or even mild discomfort. Beyond a point, the story is all implication by way of mundane suggestion, rather than chilling possibility.
The movie’s polyphonic introduction is also not sustained. Its unique aural qualities (and the couple’s acoustic fixations) fall quickly by the wayside, making its very premise feel perfunctory. For a film in which experimental music — built from bits and pieces of nature, twisted and bastardized — plays such a central role, the overarching approach to “Rabbit Trip” is disappointingly straightforward, and surprisingly literal, despite its third-act transition towards magical, symbolic territory.
The result, unfortunately, involves meting out meaning in logistical fashion. The film’s barely-hidden secrets float just beneath the surface of a pool with no ripples — without meaningful texture to complicate or disguise its themes, or turn their unveiling into an emotionally-driven experience.