This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 13th edition of the recently concluded Scary Movies with Rabbit Trap director Bryn Chainey. Rabbit Trap opens in select theaters this Friday, September 12, courtesy of IFC Films.
This conversation was moderated by FLC programmer Madeline Whittle.
Joining the likes of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie among the great troubled marriages of genre cinema, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen disappear into the roles of Darcy and Daphne Davenport, a sound engineer and his experimental musician wife, freshly decamped from London and taking up residence in an isolated cottage deep in the Welsh countryside in search of creative renewal and acoustic inspiration. When the couple set about exploring their new environs, recording instruments in tow, Darcy stumbles upon a “fairy circle” that emits a strange, unidentifiable frequency; this odd discovery is followed closely by the appearance on their doorstep of an otherworldly child who claims to live nearby and is eager to befriend the Davenports. Soon the child has become a fixture in their household, alternately ingratiating himself and raising suspicions, and exposing unacknowledged rifts and unexamined secrets that threaten to wreak psychological and spiritual havoc in the lives of his makeshift adoptive parents. Bryn Chainey has crafted a sensorially vivid, darkly beguiling debut feature that’s steeped in regional folklore, harnessing the uncanny undercurrents of occult tradition and mythology to illuminate obscure, irreducible mysteries of the human condition that stubbornly resist the flattening certainties of modernity.
