If you were to watch the first 10 to 15 minutes of “Rabbit Trap,” the fundamentally flawed feature debut of writer/director Bryn Chainey, and stop there, you might think you were witnessing the start of a unique horror vision. In particular, the way the film uses sound in these opening scenes feels like something special; it takes on a sinister resonance, almost as if it’s tapping into another plane of existence. You can practically feel it rattling through your bones and deep into the recesses of your mind. It’s a great way to open.
Then, just when you are starting to get interested in how it will manage to keep drawing you in deeper, “Rabbit Trap” reveals it actually won’t be doing that. Instead, the film starring Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen takes a shockingly steep dive into narrative tedium and ho-hum genre beats. What initially begins as a formally adventurous tale of a husband and wife trying to make sense of a sound they recorded in 1976 deep in the Welsh woods becomes a woefully meandering and mundane horror misfire that wastes its potential. Even as the sound design remains impeccable, it’s in service of little.
Premiering Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, the film follows musicians Darcy (Patel) and Daphne (McEwen) as they try to make a new album full of droning sounds captured from the natural world around them. It’s tough going with frequent power outages, but the duo keep at it, clearly in love with each other. The way sound is interwoven with their intimacy, with one scene warping and distorting in striking fashion, is stunning. Then they get a visitor in an unnamed child (Jade Croot) and everything falls apart.
Darcy initially knocks the child over, then Darcy apologizes and attempts to make amends. As their focus shifts from the interesting soundscapes of their album to the child, the film’s themes start to feel increasingly spelled-out rather than slippery. There are references to creatures lurking in the woods and discussions of how to catch rabbits, but Chainey’s attempts to get creepy mileage out of the child wear thin.
Most disappointing is how Patel’s character gets saddled with a series of nightmares that take the form of a figure at the edge of his bed. These scenes just hammer home how he has a past trauma, but they feeling tactless and forced rather than a genuine exploration of the pain we carry with us. Patel gives a solid performance and McEwen matches him well enough, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the film is more interested in its vague creepiness than in its characters.
When “Rabbit Trap” tries to pit the couple against the child, both are painted with the broadest of strokes and resemble caricatures more than actual people trying to figure out what the hell is going on. The more strange things that happen, the more we realize how little we actually know about any of them. It’s more superficial than mysterious, despite the remarkable craft that sends shivers up your spine when the forest comes alive and the sound reaches a fever pitch.
The tragedy comes in how the film traps itself in a corner with nowhere interesting or even scary to go. “Rabbit Trap” finds some occasionally effective moments of atmospheric dread and sadness, only to leave those moments stranded. You can hear the film’s promise if you turn up the volume as loud as you can and listen closely, but it remains so faint it might as well be the wind.
