Dev Patel Digs Up Folk Horror in the Dreamily Unsettling 'Rabbit Trap'

When it comes to horror movies there might not be any element more important than Sound Design. The long slow creaking of attic doors, the soft fall of surprise footsteps, the shriek of a knife through a shower. People cover their eyes when something’s scaring them but they dumbly leave their ears undefended, letting all of these nightmare whispers in. (Nobody knew this better than David Lynch, whose droning soundscapes became iconic for unsettling us even during the most banal moments.) Sound is so important to horror movies that we’ve had several horror movies explicitly about sound itself—Pontypool, Berberian Sound Studio, and in their own way the Quiet Place movies. Think of how many dusty old recordings of horrible things we’ve been forced to listen to over the decades—sounds open up our senses, worm past our best defenses. Sound gets in.

And now we can add a new one to this list—out this weekend from first-time filmmaker Bryn Chainey, the eerie slowburn folk horror Rabbit Trap stars Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen (The Alienist) as the alliterative Darcy and Daphne Davenport. The year’s 1976, and they’re a married couple of experimental musicians who’ve recently moved from London out to a cottage in the mossy Welsh countryside to collect themselves. And sounds. Importantly sounds.

Having gotten burned out by the music scene, the lovebirds have made themselves a little slice of heaven there amid the ancient stones and forests and blankets of fog—when they’re not making sweet sweet love, Darcy wanders the hills collecting sounds with his old-timey field recorder, which he then carries them back to Daphne who twists her knobs and makes the sonic magic happen. (Truth be told they also bring that recorder into the bed with them—life and work and art all mixed up.)

Happily childless, the pair have taken extremely well to their self-imposed exile and isolation—they truly seem to only need each other. It’s a portrait of domestic bliss (Dev in so many luxurious woolly sweaters), the still and quiet dream. So naturally it ‘s teetering on a precipice of which they have no concept.

There are early signs of something not quite right beneath the dreamy, woolly-sweatered surface. Darcy has nightmares of the cottage ensconced in foamy yellow fluid, and a thin shadowy figure approaching him and pressing him down hard to the bed. One night Daphne records the sounds he makes as he shakes and groans trapped inside his awful dream—when she asks him the next morning if he’d like to listen to it Darcy snaps he has no desire to, but nevertheless that if she wants to use the noises for her music she can go ahead.

Then one day while out looking for new sounds Darcy stumbles upon a faerie circle nestled in the woods—a circle of mushrooms set in the damp earth where olden tales speak of magical happenings. Suddenly there’s a puddle of water, and it’s vibrating, and the sounds his microphone picks up drop him flat like a stone to the earth. Some time later he awakes, finds his way home, and he and Daphne listen back to the strange noises he’s recorded coming up out of the ground. Inspiration grabs her quick, and she’s off to the music-making races again.

Coincidentally (ha) at this same moment a strange figure appears outside the cottage in the distance, in the mist. And the next day Darcy gets to meet them—a child of indeterminate age and sex (played by 26-year-old actress Jade Croot, the couple strangely immediately refer to the child with masculine pronouns) that will only be known as “The Child”. The Child says they’re hunting. The Child shows Darcy their rabbit traps. And the next morning when Darcy comes down from bed, The Child is sitting with Daphne making conversation. Fast friends, it would seem.

It’s fairly obvious from the get-go that all of this is going to go very sideways, but Chainey and his actors do cast a spell nonetheless—let’s be honest: it’s easy to watch Dev Patel do anything. But the Welsh countryside, so thick and ancient-seeming, is always one hell of a location, and Chainey’s got a fantastic eye for making the most of it. You can feel the moss between your fingers; the cold moisture on the tip of your nose. Your feet sink into the earth with them as they wander toward deep corners of the forest where we know they shouldn’t be wandering.

The Child grows more attached, more demanding of their time and invasive of their space. And the roots of Darcy’s deeply buried issues begin getting yanked at. His dreams become heavier. A space opens up between him and Daphne—one which The Child is only more than happy to push its own slippery way into.

A movie like this, you’ve probably got most of it worked out fifteen minutes in. But it really doesn’t matter when the telling is this gorgeously and simply told. Daphne’s strange electronic music pulses against and through ancient runes, making what’s old vibrate fresh. (It’s also refreshing that we’re dealing with the emotional healing of a man’s trauma for once.) Rabbit Trap is reminiscent of Ben Wheatley’s recent trippy folk horror In the Earth, as well as Mark Jenkins’ fantastic waking-nightmare Enys Men, although this one’s much less aggressive in its hallucinations than those two were. Things are kept simple, and we’re allowed to really feel the submerged emotional troubles of this couple bubbling up, something akin to Bergman’s Virgin Spring. Pure cold water out from stones. A small refreshing feast, one that lingers tastefully after.