There is no microphone in the world that is strong enough to capture a person’s deepest secrets, and yet every time Darcy (a convincingly worried Dev Patel) bring their audio equipment for a hike around the ancient Welsh countryside, it is as if the planet speaks things to him that he could never hope to notice with the bare ear – ancient (and ominous) secrets that have been waiting for centuries on someone to hear their Confessions.
Such things are really not what Darcy is trying to find with the field recordings as he does for his wife Daphne (”Blue Jean“Breakout Rose McEwan, down -to -earth and excellent), an experimental musician who interpolates flutter from Grackles and the Earth’s drum to powerful natural music that no one wants to buy in 1976. But so it goes when you try to communicate with nature: much like Darcy and Daphne may think they is capturing the subliminal sounds from the forest surrounding their new cabin, it would be more accurate to say they are receiving them.
“With your eyes you come into the world,” says someone. “With your ears the world will come into you.” So starts brown chaineys’Rabbit trap“A vague but effectively disturbing piece of trip-people fear about what happens when the world refuses to leave. When nature begins to reason from somewhere deep inside your legs, and the vibrations eventually become so high that Darcy and Daphne are forced to perceive even the parts of themselves that they have spent their entire lives trying to keep quiet.
It turns out to be difficult to determine exactly what it means, and it only becomes more difficult when Chaineys convinced but more and more hallucinogenic debut is going into depth during their last acts, but “Rabbit trap“Is nothing if not in advance about the rules of the game. Sure, the film eventually stumbles over a variety of recognizable genre designators (an ominous circle of fungi, a number of bushes that ward off local spirits, a pool that shakes while the rest of the world is still, etc.), but only after it has set its conditions at a more elementary level.
Instead of horror, which is too viscerally artificial to be meaningful in this context, Chainey would prefer to moor ourselves with thoughts about the mystery with “nature’s music” and how it forces us to listen to answers beyond the shallow depth of human weaknesses such as fear and shame (the one film Opens with the persistent image of a dancing sinus wave, as if it instructs us to look at everything that comes with our ears). Darcy suffers from night horror that makes the audience excited by expectation, but “Rabbit Trap” is less interested in the slimy tree monster that comes with them – or the yellow foam that ejaculates from the walls of the cottage every time he pops up – than it is in the sound of its Hero’s panicked breath. It is less interested in the emotional dynamics between Darcy and his wife than how the field recordings they take home from the forest seem to take Daphne by their gender when she hears them.
It is as good as the individual self -contempt that these characters have in the stomach is much stronger than any of the resentments they can house for each other (unspecified as all Of these things, there are all the time), but – as part of another founding horror rope – the scene where this hyperfotogenic couple goes wild against each other right next to Daphne’s delicate studio equipment is followed by a serious behavior. In this case: the sudden appearance of a needy but vacant child who looks like a 12-year-old boy is played by a 12-year-old girl (the wonderful Jade Croot, who delivers a stingy hollow performance reminiscent of Barry Keoghan in ” The Killing of a Sacred Deer “) and acts as a 1,200 year old folklore.
We do not know if Darcy and Daphne wanted a child (Darcy asks the question when it is asked), but nature takes its way in one way or another. We also do not know the child’s name, where it came from or what happened to its parents. Darcy and Daphne hardly think about asking. The logic is struggling to get a word in terms of edge. After all, there are few things that are more annoying than a sound without a source, especially when that sound does not disappear. When it starts to call you “mom” and giggles when it leads you on a winding path to where the old people live on the other side of the quarry.
How frustrating it can be to watch such an exciting film get so high on its own range (the last act is unbound to the extent that it can only be understood by a fable’s logic), Chainey’s aggressive refusal to get involved in the details of Darcy’s interior ” rot “or unpacking Daphne’s artistic uncertainty means that this anger three -handed players can remain appealing immune to” everything is trauma “which has made so much of modern horror to feel like a form of collective psychotherapy. Equal parts Ben Wheatley’s” in the Earth ” And Jerzy Skolomowski’s “The Shout”, “Rabbit Trap” is the kind of experience that can be better explained by some fungi than even the most detailed internet explain. It is definitely the kind of experience that is best by accepting these terms as soon as you can.
Chainey does what he can to get you on his wavelength. The situation in the film’s heart goes from bad to worse along a linear track, but horror-free-out promised by its creepy moment never really cares to be realized. The shock will never come because sharp sounds would only get in the way of a movie that would rather listen for the subtle dissonance that forms between humans and their nature – a movie that becomes “creepier” when threatening to unite the two by cutting through sounds like Darcy And Daphne uses to dampen the parts of themselves that they are afraid to hear.
Chainey’s most pointed moment (very free, very ambiguous) script can be the stage where Darcy locks the child out of the cottage after saying he could “come back at any time.” It is an extremely literal example of an idea that the “rabbit trap” digs in until it digs a hole right through the floorboards: Words are lies that we chop out of noise, but the truths they can be used to hide not only disappear. into nothing. “What happens when a sound dies?”, Asks the child. “Where does it go?” Darcy has the impression that it dissolves in molecules, but the child gives a different explanation. “Sound is a ghost,” he says, “and your body is the house that it haunts. When you hear a sound you become the sound.” And once you become the sound it can only be silenced at your own risk.
Rating: B-
“Rabbit Trap” premiered in 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking distribution in the United States.
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