Dev Patel’s New Movie Has the Most Insufferable Kid Character in Years

PARK CITY, Utah—Rabbit Trap might have been called A Series of Unfortunately Clichéd Folk-Horror Events, given that writer/director Bryn Chainey’s feature debut, which just premiered in the Midnight section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a collection of genre tropes in service of a nonsensical and grating tale.

The story of a couple whose getaway is interrupted by the most off-putting child in the world, this supernatural whatsit throws a variety of inexplicable ingredients against the wall in the hopes that something will stick. Alas, nothing—including a game performance by Dev Patel—can prevent it from tumbling down a bottomless hole from which it can’t escape.

In 1976 Wales, Daphne (Rosy McEwen) is working on her latest album of experimental sonic abstractions, while her husband Darcy (Patel) wanders the nearby fields and woods with a giant microphone with which he catches environmental sounds as a “field recordist.” The reason the duo has relocated to this remote spot isn’t clear, but that’s in keeping with Rabbit Trap’s general haziness.

As will later be revealed, Daphne is less a celebrity than an “influential” artist with a former touring career (before she chose to settle down, seemingly to her chagrin) and a fondness for the oscillators, sound wands, and other equipment that dominates her workspace. Darcy on the other hand, suffers from recurring nightmares involving a titanically tall, bald figure (his dad?) who sits on the edge of his bed eating some strange item (its gooey detritus plopping to the floor), and who pushes Darcy down when he attempts to rise to greet the scary intruder.

One night, Daphne awakens to the sounds of Darcy in the throes of this unpleasant dream and decides to record his anxious breathing. This upsets Darcy, who instinctively assumes that she means to include it, exploitatively, in her work. A spat concludes with Darcy asking his spouse (apparently not for the first time) if she’s okay, to which she derides him as “boring.”

Simmering tensions bubble beneath the surface of Rabbit Trap’s early going, although the root cause (or specifics) of the couple’s problems is destined to remain forever mysterious. Instead, Chainey’s film opts to proceed down alternative incomprehensible routes, beginning with Darcy picking up strange audio noises in the woods (they sound like scrambled voices on the howling wind) which peak at a circle lined with mushrooms. When he steps inside it, the world goes smeary-wonky, and he passes out.

Upon regaining consciousness and returning home, Darcy plays his newest recording for Daphne, and it triggers something primally libidinous in them. Moreover, it attracts the attention of an unnamed kid (Jade Croot) whom Daphne sees standing outside their cottage, and whom Darcy spies and tackles on a hillside.

While this child is clearly a girl, Daphne and Darcy will subsequently refer to her as a “him,” and if that’s confusing, so too is everything else about this adolescent. “I followed the music,” says the kid, who turns out to be a self-described “hunter” with a gift for catching rabbits. On an outing to teach Darcy the tricks of the trade, the kid explains that snagging a bunny requires offering it the thing that it most dearly covets.

This is ostensibly a hint about the predicament that will soon befall Daphne and Darcy, yet Rabbit Trap isn’t capable of lucidly following through on that suggestion.

As the boy spends time in the couple’s company, he reveals that he lives far away, is motherless, and takes Daphne and Darcy’s statement that he’s always welcome as a literal promise. He also clings to both, Daphne in particular, and has a deep knowledge of the mushroom circles, which supposedly have to do with faeries. Before long, the kid is crooning creepy tunes and spouting gibberish about the region’s mythic “Old Ones” and the front-yard plants which keep them at bay, all of which is received by Patel and McEwen’s protagonists with blank, befuddled looks.

Daphne and Darcy’s perplexity is the most relatable thing about Rabbit Trap. Alas, neither character is the least bit interesting, largely because they’re half-formed and tattered, more vague ideas than living, breathing people.

Darcy tells the kid that sound is “a memory” and “a ghost,” and he earns the boy’s ire when he fails to properly clean and eat a rabbit that was caught for them. Eventually, Daphne is led into a cave by the kid and Darcy surreptitiously follows, only to become mesmerized by a puddle whose water vibrates ominously (the second one he’s seen in as many days!). At the same time, Daphne visits the woodland home of the “Old Ones,” where uprooted trees sing shrieking songs and where the film dives completely off the deep end into symbolic mumbo-jumbo.

There’s a fine line between tantalizingly oblique and clumsily impenetrable, and Chainey quickly crosses from the former into the latter and never looks back. The kid ultimately starts acting like a folk-horror version of Dennis the Menace, demanding to stay at Daphne and Darcy’s home and throwing unholy temper tantrums when he’s dragged from the premises. Hallucinatory madness eventually engulfs everything, but with so little of substance or heft to hold onto, the effect is merely confounding and off-putting.

Croot is successful at being the most insufferable screen character in recent memory—from the moment go, her kid is an intolerably cagey and needy pest that one wishes Daphne and Darcy would immediately turn away. That they don’t is simply because Croot’s enigmatic stranger possesses some unnatural power (and because Daphne and Darcy want a child?), but Chainey’s unwillingness to explicate anything—even through intimation—sabotages his premise, not to mention his subsequent stabs at uncanny suspense.

There’s plenty of posing for the camera in Rabbit Trap, and just as much wannabe-unsettling cacophony. The film, however, has nothing to impart about the relationship between listening and seeing, or the spellbinding magic of music and the sounds of the world. On the contrary, it mostly comes across as a deliberately opaque amalgam of In the Earth and Berberian Sound Studio—a host of eerie signifiers that signify nothing