Crew
Director/Screenplay – Bryn Chainey, Producers – Alex Ashworth, Lawrence Inglee, Elisa Lleras, Sean Marley, Martin Metz, Daniel Noah, Adrian Politowski & Elijah Wood, Photography – Andreas Johannessen, Music – Lucrecia Dalt, Visual Effects – Maere Studio (Supervisors – Nicholas Ashe Bateman & Federico La Tona), Special Effects Supervisor – Sean Harland, Prosthetics – Matthew Smith Prosthetics Ltd. (Designer – Matthew Smith), Production Design – Lucie Red. Production Company – Spectrevision.
Cast
Dev Patel (Darcy Davenport), Rosy McEwen (Daphne Davenport), Jade Croot (The Child), Nicholas Sampson (The Shadow)
Plot
Wales, 1976. Husband and wife Darcy and Daphne Davenport have retreated to a cottage in the countryside to work on their next album. They are busy recording sounds of nature and the wild around them. They see a figure watching them and Darcy runs out to tackle the person, which proves to be a child. The child later accepts their invitation to come back and visit. He takes them around the landscape to show them a deeper magic to be found in nature. However, things begin to change when Darcy inadvertently steps over the edges of a fairy circle and the child begins to unnaturally attach to them.
Rabbit Trap was a feature-length directorial debut for British director Bryn Chainey who has been making short films since the mid-2000s. The surprise about the film is that for such an English production it is produced by Elijah Wood’s US-based Spectrevision company that specialises in horror.
Rabbit Trap plants its feet squarely in the Folk Horror genre, which has grown to become a reasonable genre niche in the 2010s/20s. The film is shot in the Welsh countryside and has the benefit of some beautiful natural photography. As Jade Croot takes Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen on a tour, showing them fairy rings and strange tree structures, while talking of how the rabbits are messengers from the other world and have a secret underground, the landscape itself takes on a wonderfully mysterious and otherworldly quality.
What really makes the film work is the performance from the kid, Jade Croot. He comes with a pleadingly needy and yet mysterious quality that seems to radiate an otherworldly knowledge. The dialogue Croot is given with its hints of folk knowledge and his failure to their answer questions is very well written. There are other good performances in particular from Rose McEwen, who demonstrates she is a face worth watching out for in future.
The logline “Married couple Daphne and Darcy Davenport are two musicians who moved from London to a cottage in Wales to complete their new album. By accident they record a mystical sound never heard before and gradually disconnect from reality” makes a play for Rabbit Trap being a film about music and shows a couple trying to incorporate local sounds into their recording. That made me immediately think about the Irish Folk Horror film All You Need is Death (2023) about a couple uncovering a forbidden song. That said, the record here is not much relevant to what happens and is no more than the couple’s vocation.
Rabbit Trap reaches a particularly surreal ending [PLOT SPOILERS] where the kid becomes obsessive and wants to stay and make his home with them, ending with them having to force him out, whereupon the kid sets the gorse hedges around the property on fire. The fire surrounds the house, before we abruptly cut to its apparent ruins. But as we look closer, we see that nature in the form of small animals and foliage have overrun the house. Moss and trees are growing indoors. Dev, Rosy and the kid sit down to breakfast as thought the perfect family. They return to bed and the kid comes and curls up between them, before dissolving into it is not quite clear what. We follow Dev and Rosy as they take his remains and bury them, where we then see that the body is the carcass of a rabbit.
Elijah Wood’s Spectrevision company have been behind other genre efforts such as Toad Road (2012), Cooties (2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), Open Windows (2014), The Boy (2015), The Greasy Strangler (2016), Mandy (2018), Color Out of Space (2019), Daniel Isn’t Real (2019), Archenemy (2020) and Demring (2025).
(Nominee for Best Supporting Actress (Jade Croot) and Best Cinematography at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here