PARK CITY, UTAH Jan. 26 (UPI) — Rabbit Trap, which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, is a slow burn horror movie that doesn’t pay off enough.
Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) are musicians living in Wales in 1976. Darcy records sounds outside to blend into tracks for his wife’s songs.
One day a child (Jade Croot) visits Darcy outside and comes back to the house to meet Daphne. They welcome the kid until he becomes needy and pushy.
The recording of natural sounds in a unique region is interesting and plays well in Dolby Atmos. However, there is only so much watching Patel hold a microphone a viewer can take.
The film shows how Daphne incorporates those sounds into a track, but unfortunately, Rabbit Trap is not a movie about avant-garde music so it gives minimal screen time to that.
The child starts to overstay his welcome, visiting in the early morning and requesting food and drink so he can stay longer. He gets angry that the Davenports never skinned and ate the rabbit he trapped for them.
That’s the rabbit trap. The rabbit trap is also a metaphor for the child trapping the Davenports, but there is an actual rabbit trap in the movie.
A kid from hell is a real problem for an adult couple. How do you force him to leave?
They don’t want to hurt him but they ultimately have to lay hands on him to remove him from their house, which never becomes more of a problem because they’re so remote no other characters enter the story.
Certainly, the kid doesn’t go to child services to report the Davenports for abuse, and he wouldn’t want to get them arrested. He wants to live with them.
The child introduces the Davenports to local mythology which may be somewhat interesting as a different take on demonic legends. They call the ultimate evil The Shadow (Nicholas Sampson).
The mythology too is parsed out very slowly. An hour of that becomes little more than a dry history lesson.
There are some creepy, haunting images in the final half hour. Glass melts, slugs and vegetation overrun the house and more but it is too little too late.
Rabbit Trap will probably interest a very niche audience. For anyone else, it fails to make the case for Welsh folk tales.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
