RABBIT TRAP

Rabbit Trap is a film about listening. Not simply because Darcy is a sound recordist and Daphne an experimental musician, but because Bryn Chainey keeps asking what might be present in the world if we paid sufficiently strange attention to it.

The soundscape is extraordinary. Insects, wind, field recordings and noises that seem to sit somewhere between the natural and the impossible make the Welsh landscape feel less like scenery than a consciousness Darcy has accidentally tuned into. The camera follows suit. Close framing and soft backgrounds keep the couple trapped within their own small emotional space even when they are surrounded by open country. The landscape is enormous, yet the film feels intensely private.

Then a child appears.

The obvious route is changeling folklore, and Rabbit Trap happily scatters fairy rings, gorse, old beings and trickster logic around the place. But the more interesting question is what the child wants from Darcy and Daphne, and what they want from it. When it presents them with a hunted rabbit, it explains that a sacrifice only matters if what is offered genuinely means something. That rule quietly becomes the key to the whole film.

There is a persuasive reading that Darcy and Daphne are carrying the grief of a child they never had, or lost before they could properly make that child part of their lives. Their inability to give the visiting child a name is particularly difficult to ignore. Yet the film never tidies this into diagnosis. The supernatural may be processing their grief, exploiting it, answering it, or doing several of those things at once.

Most importantly, the child is not easily reduced to something evil. By the end, fear gives way to tenderness. What initially looks like invasion becomes acceptance, and what appears to be a trap starts looking remarkably like release.

That is Rabbit Trap's loveliest trick. It uses some of folk horror's oldest and least trustworthy inhabitants to tell an unexpectedly moving story about finally being able to let something go.

Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast.

Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Rabbit Trap, along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes, at folknhell.com.