| Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
An audio technician. A lonely house. Woodland replete with unfamiliar fungi and uncanny sounds. There’s a degree to which Rabbit Trap feels like a more widely accessible take on Ben Wheatley’s In The Earth; one might also detect shades of Enys Men; and yet, with plenty of room to manoeuvre within that space, it weaves a magic of its own. It’s the story of the said technician – Dev Patel’s Darcy – and his partner, folk musician Daphne (Rosy McEwen), who retreat to a Welsh cottage to work on the latter’s new single. There, collecting audio samples from nature, Darcy becomes aware of a strange background hum and follows it to a toadstool circle in the woods, where stranger things begin to happen.
Humans have long been intrigued by these perfect circles, which form as they do because the toadstools of which they are comprised are not individual organisms but rather the fruiting bodies of something central to them, larger, hidden beneath the earth. That sense of hidden presence makes itself felt throughout Bryn Chainey’s sensual folk horror film, in which colours and textures are constantly in conversation, the domestic and artificial with the wild and organic. A more direct intrusion of the hidden world manifests with the appearance of a ‘child’ (impressive newcomer Jade Croot), whose age is actually as ambiguous as ‘his’ gender, but who is happy to accept whatever identity the couple project onto him as he inveigles himself into their lives.
The film’s success hinges on its unwillingness to take sides. Who are this English couple who have intruded into this ancient landscape, planning to take from it without giving anything in return? Chainey posits that they don’t need to be outsiders – it’s not their origin that sets them at odds with the place, but their initial lack of interest in learning the rules, and the lack of respect that conveys. As they become attached to the child, who fills a hollow place in their lives, it is made clear that love, in the absence of respect, is not enough. They will only be accepted here if they are willing to change. Can they exert agency in that process of change, or will they be consumed by it? Are they at risk of losing one another, or on the brink of discovering a new kind of togetherness as part of something larger?
Some critics have identified closely with the couple and read the film as a simpler narrative about nice people going to a strange place and having bad things happen to them. This does Chainey a disservice, though at the same time it highlights how well he has understood his characters. At first glance, it’s easy to take Darcy and Daphne for sweet – if slightly eccentric – essentially unproblematic protagonists, and indeed they remain likeable throughout, even at the point when they are aggressively reasserting their boundaries. They are perhaps no more responsible for the harm they do than rabbits released in the wrong environment, but that harm must still be contained. Viewers, meanwhile, are charged with a different sort of responsibility, called upon to understand, so that should they go wandering off the familiar path, they won’t make the same mistakes.
Initially structured like a conventional mystery, the film gradually shifts gears, so that the narrative form itself takes on a different quality, English rationalism giving way to a more holistic, poetic Celtic approach. inevitably, some viewers will find themselves alienated – or becoming aware of their alienness – in the process. The 1970s setting softens this somewhat by asking us all to imagine, at the outset, that we are in the past – just not necessarily as deep a past as the one that is still present in this land. That outsiders’ pursuit of mystic wisdom popular amongst musicians and other artists in the era feeds easily into the story, just as the colours and textures and patterns of Seventies clothing feed into the wider visual experience.
Intelligent and immersive, with the fine tuned performances one would expect from this cast, Rabbit Trap runs a lot deeper than may at first be apparent. For all its sometime unpleasantness, it’s a pleasure to get lost in.
Reviewed on: 30 Jan 2026
