(L–R) Jade Croot, Rosy McEwen, and Bryn Chainey attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Rabbit Trap” at Eccles Theatre on January 24, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Stephen Speckman for Sundance Institute)
By Lucy Spicer
Listen to writer-director Bryn Chainey talk about his feature directorial debut, Rabbit Trap, and you’ll learn that he’s a big fan of two things: sound and folklore. “I wanted it to be entirely about sound, basically. The best-sounding horror movie ever, that’s the goal,” says Chainey amid audience laughter at the film’s post-premiere Q&A on January 24 at Eccles Theatre in Park City.
In a way, he’s not really joking. Rabbit Trap, which premiered in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight section, is built on sound. Thrumming, pulsing, all-consuming audio created by myriad tools used in early electronic music. “A lot of this film came out of research of the pioneers of electronic music, at least in the U.K.,” says British Australian Chainey. The filmmaker’s affinity for analog gadgetry led to two other fundamental decisions about the movie: It would be shot on 35mm film, and it would be set in 1976 at the latest.
Chainey expresses his love of sound through one of the film’s main characters, Daphne (Rosy McEwen), who is an experimental electronic musician. She and her husband, Darcy (Dev Patel), move to the Welsh countryside in order to help Daphne collect some inspiration for her musical projects. The couple are clearly each repressing some personal issues, and their current forms of communication will only sustain them for so long. After Darcy steps in a fairy ring while walking in the forest, their troubles get exponentially more complicated in the form of an unnerving child (Jade Croot) who shows up on their property. At first, it seems as though the young rabbit trapper just needs a friend, but it’s not long before Daphne and Darcy find themselves unable to shake off the eerie, unnamed figure.
Enter Chainey’s second love: folklore. “For me, fairies and goblins and pixies, they’re not evil,” explains Chainey. “In the Welsh folklore, they’re not evil, they’re not good, they’re sort of recalcitrant and kind of needy and inconsistent, just like children. They want attention.” When asked about his inspirations, Chainey names fantasy illustrator Brian Froud. “As a kid, I grew up reading those books,” says Chainey. The magic leapt from the page. “It just felt not like stories or superstitions; it felt like a strange expression of nature. And as a kid, it just felt real.”
In addition to one unsettling mystery child, Rabbit Trap’s magic also manifests in the sensual omnipresence of the natural world. The forest looms, moss creeps, and fungi spring up as they please. “This is a really intimate story about just three characters and a house. It felt important to let nature — for it to feel big, as well, and for nature to infiltrate that part of the film,” says Chainey. “For us, the key was about making everything feel natural, earthy, textural. I wanted a movie I could touch.”
For Daphne and Darcy, the question is whether this sensory overload will push any inner demons to the surface. “I hope the universal takeaway was that we’ve all got something we’re harboring inside, some sort of shame, some sort of secret, some part of us that we loathe and we don’t want to share,” explains Chainey. “Listening is a very weird, sacred magic. It requires two people: one person to say and one person to hear.”
