‘Rabbit Trap’ Review: Dev Patel Tampers With Ancient Magic in Bryn Chainey’s ASMR Folk Horror

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Feb 2

*Dev Patel in Bryn Chainey's 'Rabbit Trap' -* **Andreas Johannessen/Courtesy Sundance Institute**

An Immersive Exploration of Sound,

Memory, and the Unseen Forces of the Natural World

In his feature debut, writer-director Bryn Chainey constructs an atmospheric and formally rigorous work that engages with the folk horror tradition while expanding its thematic and sensory scope. Rabbit Trap, set in 1973, follows Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne (Rosy McEwen), a renowned musical duo from London who retreat to a secluded cabin in the Welsh countryside to complete their latest album. When Darcy records an anomalous sound from the surrounding forest—one not meant for human ears—he inadvertently unleashes an ancient, preternatural force embedded within the land itself.

Chainey’s film situates itself within the lineage of folk horror but differentiates itself through an acute focus on sonic landscapes and the phenomenology of sound. Where films of the genre typically foreground landscape as a site of psychological disintegration and supernatural rupture, Rabbit Trap amplifies this effect through its meticulous use of sound design, treating auditory perception as a primary locus of horror. By constructing an environment where sound operates both as an instrument of creative transcendence and a conduit for existential dread, Chainey renders his film an immersive sensory experience that extends beyond the visual field.

The film’s sonic architecture is one of its most distinctive and unsettling elements. Best experienced in Dolby Atmos, Rabbit Trap employs field recordings, ambient frequencies, and meticulously designed sonic textures to immerse its audience in an auditory environment that is simultaneously hypnotic and disquieting. Every auditory detail—dripping water, wind slicing through dense foliage, the unsettling reverberation of unseen forces—enhances the film’s liminal atmosphere, blurring the boundaries between the corporeal and the spectral.

At the film’s center is Darcy’s near-obsessive engagement with sound as both medium and metaphysical entity. He conceptualizes sound not merely as vibration but as an imprint, an ephemeral haunting, articulating his philosophy with the statement: “Sound is a ghost … and your body is the house it haunts.” His recordings function as both creative inspiration and a portal to forces beyond human comprehension. When Daphne listens to his captured audio, she experiences a profound creative breakthrough, channeling the sound into an ecstatic compositional frenzy. Yet, as the film unfolds, it becomes evident that this “breakthrough” is inextricable from possession, as the sound itself begins to exert a parasitic influence over her consciousness.

The film’s treatment of ASMR-like soundscapes extends beyond horror to evoke intimacy, vulnerability, and suppressed trauma. One particularly evocative sequence involves Daphne secretly recording Darcy as he speaks in his sleep, transcribing nocturnal confessions that he is unable—or unwilling—to articulate while awake. Chainey’s direction imbues these moments with a sense of quiet revelation, positioning sound as both a means of communication and an index of repressed memory. Patel and McEwen’s performances deepen this dynamic, conveying a relationship marked by unspoken wounds and unarticulated grief.

As Darcy and Daphne’s fascination with the sound intensifies, they encounter a child (Jade Croot), whose presence evokes the uncanny ambiguities of folklore. The child, possessing an unnerving self-possession and cryptic knowledge of local legends, offers fragmented insights into the nature of the forces that have been awakened. Through their stories—intertwined with the ritualistic practice of rabbit hunting—Chainey invokes the enduring motifs of folk horror: the cyclical recurrence of ancient forces, the porous boundary between past and present, and the inescapable weight of the landscape’s history.

Croot delivers a performance that oscillates between innocence and menace, rendering the child an ambiguous figure whose presence destabilizes the narrative’s psychological terrain. Their interactions with Darcy and Daphne introduce a spectral dimension to the couple’s already-fractured relationship, as the child appears both drawn to and implicated in the supernatural phenomena unfolding around them.

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Chainey’s screenplay operates on multiple levels, intertwining folk horror’s traditional preoccupations with a more contemporary meditation on artistic obsession and psychological dissolution. Rather than presenting the supernatural as an external threat, the film allows its horror to seep into the interiority of its characters, manifesting through their creative processes and emotional fractures.

Dev Patel delivers a performance of remarkable subtlety, conveying Darcy’s oscillation between creative fervor and creeping dread. Patel imbues the character with an intense interiority, rendering his descent into obsession both compelling and unnerving. His physicality—restless, taut with barely contained anxiety—aligns with the film’s sonic themes, as his body appears to absorb and respond to the auditory anomalies surrounding him.

Rosy McEwen, following her acclaimed performance in Blue Jean, delivers a portrayal that balances fragility with an unsettling sense of abandon. Daphne’s arc is one of transformation, as she moves from artistic stagnation to near-transcendent possession. McEwen’s performance lends the film a visceral charge, particularly in sequences where she loses herself to the music derived from the captured sound. One scene, in which she performs a composition set to the eerie fae-like frequencies recorded by Darcy, unfolds with an intensity that borders on the hallucinatory, drawing the audience into her altered state of perception.

The film’s cinematography, helmed by Benjamin Kracun (Beast, Saint Maud), reinforces its thematic concerns through a visual language that emphasizes negative space and peripheral movement. The Welsh countryside, rendered in stark yet painterly compositions, becomes an extension of the film’s horror, its natural beauty laced with an ineffable menace.

Rabbit Trap is not structured around conventional horror beats but instead cultivates an atmosphere of slow-building dread. Chainey employs a methodical pacing that allows the film’s tension to accumulate gradually, withholding overt terror in favor of an existential unease that permeates every frame. The absence of conventional jump scares does not dilute its horror; rather, it heightens the film’s impact, allowing its uncanny elements to settle into the viewer’s consciousness long after the film has ended.

Chainey’s debut establishes him as a filmmaker of considerable formal precision, one who understands that horror is most effective when it operates on multiple registers—psychological, sensory, and metaphysical. Rabbit Trap is a testament to the power of sound in shaping cinematic experience, transforming the auditory into a locus of both creative transcendence and existential terror.

This is a film that demands to be experienced in its fullest sensory capacity, inviting audiences not merely to watch, but to listen—to attune themselves to the sonic frequencies of a world in which the past reverberates endlessly, refusing to be silenced.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Title: Rabbit Trap
Section: Sundance (Midnight)
Director-screenwriter: Bryn Chaney
Cast: Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, Jade Croot
Sales agent: CAA, Bankside Films
Running time: 1 hr 37 mins