In ‘Rabbit Trap,’ we see a musician named Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) venture out of the city and into remote Wales as she builds her next album around nature. As we can tell by her reserve and his nightmares, they seem to be taking with them some emotional distress. There’s something not being discussed. But when it comes to making music, this setting will do it. It has to.
If you’re expecting scares, you won’t find them here. What ensues is less folk horror and more of an abstract meditation on trauma. It’s not about rediscovering some creative spark, not really. Instead, it’s about what it means to mine for something deeper: reconnecting the body with the mind, with the earth and, yes, with the soul.
This dark destination for Bryn Chainey’s film works in concert with how idyllic this creative retreat feels at first. Darcy ventures out each day to capture field recordings of nature: wind, water dripping into a bucket, a flock of birds in flight. On a quiet morning, Darcy asks Daphne what’s wrong. She responds, “Don’t you ever want to dissolve? Just melt into the earth.” They seem to do exactly that in front of Chainey’s lens. The production is lush and green, swoonily captured by director of photography Andreas Johannessen. Costumed in earth tones, human bodies seem to fade into their environment. Wide shots swallow those bodies up into the frame, overflowing with trees and wild bushes. It’s so beautiful. But something’s wrong. ...
