"Like Daniel Kokotajlo's recent Starve Acre or Mark Jenkin's Enys Men, Rabbit Trap swathes you in ambient sound design and insists on a kind of atavistic authenticity in the 70s stylings themselves: the woollens, the gloom and the analogue recording equipment. Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play Darcy and Daphne, an English couple involved in the music scene; she is a folk singer whose last LP was called Mono Moon."
"They rent a cottage featuring the kind of windows at which, in Withnail's immortal words, faces look in at. Darcy is Daphne's producer and sound engineer and tapes interesting sounds thereabouts for use on the record birdsong, rainwater dripping into a barrel but is also picking up a strange thrumming from the shroomy netherworld. Soon this English couple find themselves befriended and yet menaced by a smudgy-faced, jumper-wearing feral Welsh child (rather brilliantly played by Jade Croot) who could be any age from nine to 54,"
Rabbit Trap places an English couple in a remote 1970s Welsh cottage to record a folk album. The production emphasizes atavistic 70s authenticity through woollens, analogue gear and ambient sound design. Darcy records environmental noises while Daphne, a folk singer, seeks a new record. A feral, ambiguous-age Welsh child befriends and unsettles them, invoking Tylwyth Teg lore and revealing a rabbit trap used for fetish-like sacrifices. The couple experience obscure psychological shifts and rites amid evocative imagery. The film remains atmospheric, strongly acted, and controlled, yet it ultimately feels directionless.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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