There’s no microphone on the earth sturdy sufficient to select up an individual’s deepest secrets and techniques, and but each time Darcy (a compellingly anxious Dev Patel) takes his sound gear for a wander across the primordial Welsh countryside, it’s as if the planet is talking issues to him that he may by no means hope to note with the bare ear — historic (and sinister) secrets and techniques which have waited centuries on finish for somebody to listen to their confessions.
Such issues definitely aren’t what Darcy is looking for with the sector recordings that he makes for his spouse Daphne (“Blue Jean” breakout Rose McEwan, earthy and wonderful), an experimental musician who interpolates the flutter of grackles and the thrum of the earth into percussive nature music that nobody needs to purchase in 1976. However so it goes once you attempt to commune with nature: A lot as Darcy and Daphne would possibly assume they’re capturing the subliminal noises of the forest that surrounds their new cottage, it might be extra correct to say that they’re receiving them.
“Together with your eyes, you enter the world,” somebody says. “Together with your ears, the world enters you.” So begins Bryn Chainey’s “Rabbit Lure,” a imprecise however successfully unsettling slice of trip-folk horror about what occurs when the world refuses to depart. When nature begins to resonate from someplace deep inside your bones, and the vibrations finally develop so loud that Darcy and Daphne are compelled to understand even the elements of themselves they’ve spent their complete lives attempting to maintain quiet.
It proves onerous to pin down exactly what meaning, and it solely will get tougher as Chainey’s sure-handed however more and more hallucinogenic debut goes off the deep finish throughout its ultimate acts, however “Rabbit Lure” is nothing if not up entrance concerning the guidelines of the sport. Positive, the film finally stumbles throughout quite a lot of recognizable style signifiers (an ominous circle of mushrooms, a row of bushes that push back native spirits, a puddle that shudders whereas the remainder of the world lies nonetheless, and so forth.), however solely after it’s set its phrases on a extra elemental stage.
In lieu of leap scares, that are too viscerally man-made to make sense on this context, Chainey would favor to unmoor us with musings concerning the mysteries of “nature’s music,” and the way it forces us to hear for solutions past the shallow depths of human foibles like concern and disgrace (the movie opens with the sustained picture of a dancing sine wave, as if instructing us to look at the whole lot that follows with our ears). Darcy suffers from evening terrors that make the viewers tense with expectation, however “Rabbit Lure” is much less within the slimy tree monster that comes with them — or the yellow foam that ejaculates from the cottage partitions each time he seems — than it’s within the sound of its hero’s panicked respiration. It’s much less within the emotional dynamic between Darcy and his spouse than it’s in how the sector recordings they convey residence from the forest appear to seize Daphne by her intercourse every time she hears them.
That’s simply as nicely, as the person self-loathing these characters maintain of their guts is way stronger than any of the resentments they could harbor for one another (unspecified as all of these issues stay all through), however — as a part of one other grounding horror trope — the scene the place this hyper-photogenic couple goes feral on one another proper subsequent to Daphne’s fragile studio gear is adopted by a extreme comeuppance. On this case: The sudden look of a needy however vacant youngster who appears to be like like a 12-year-old boy, is performed by a 12-year-old lady (the marvelous Jade Croot, delivering a deviously hole efficiency paying homage to Barry Keoghan in “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”), and acts like a 1,200-year-old piece of folklore.
We don’t know if Darcy and Daphne wished a child (Darcy punts the query when requested), however nature takes its course in a method or one other. We additionally don’t know the kid’s title, the place it got here from, or what occurred to its dad and mom. Darcy and Daphne barely assume to ask. Logic struggles to get a phrase in edgewise. In spite of everything, few issues are extra unnerving than a sound with out a supply, particularly when that sound received’t go away. When it begins calling you “Mother” and snickering because it leads you on a winding path to the place the outdated ones reside on the opposite facet of the quarry.
Irritating as it may be to look at such an intriguing film get so excessive by itself provide (the final act is untethered to the purpose that it may well solely be understood by the logic of a fable), Chainey’s aggressive refusal to have interaction with the specifics of Darcy’s internal “rot” or to unpack Daphne’s inventive insecurities permits this delirious three-hander to stay appealingly proof against the “the whole lot is trauma” strategy that has made a lot of contemporary horror really feel like a type of collective psychotherapy. Equal elements Ben Wheatley’s “Within the Earth” and Jerzy Skolomowski’s “The Shout,” “Rabbit Lure” is the kind of expertise that may very well be higher defined by sure mushrooms than even even probably the most detailed web explainer. It’s undoubtedly the kind of expertise that’s finest loved by accepting these phrases as quickly as you may.
Chainey does what he can to get you on his wavelength. The state of affairs on the coronary heart of the film goes from unhealthy to worse alongside a linear trajectory, however the horror freak-out promised by its eeriest moments by no means actually bothers to materialize. The jolts by no means come as a result of sharp noises would solely get in the best way of a film that may relatively hear for the delicate dissonance that varieties between individuals and their nature — a film that will get “scarier” because it threatens to reconcile the 2 by slicing by means of the noise that Darcy and Daphne use to muffle the elements of themselves they’re afraid to listen to.
Probably the most pointed second of Chainey’s (very spare, very ambiguous) script could be the scene the place Darcy locks the kid out of the cottage after saying that he may “come again anytime.” It’s an especially literal instance of an concept that “Rabbit Lure” digs into till it burrows a gap straight by means of the floorboards: Phrases are lies that we carve out of noise, however the truths they could be used to obscure don’t simply peter out into nothingness. “What occurs when a sound dies?,” the kid asks. “The place does it go?” Darcy is underneath the impression that it dissolves into molecules, however the youngster affords one other rationalization. “Sound is a ghost,” he says, “and your physique is the home that it haunts. While you hear a sound, you develop into the sound.” And when you develop into the sound, it may well solely be silenced at your individual peril.
Grade: B-
“Rabbit Lure” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition. It’s presently looking for U.S. distribution.
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