“Together with your eyes you enter the world, together with your ears the world enters you,” says Daphne (Rosy McEwen), an experimental music artist who has moved right into a cottage deep within the Welsh countryside together with her husband, Darcy (Dev Patel). It’s simply one of many many poetic, if vaguely ambiguous, strains of dialogue in Rabbit Lure, a technically excellent however stubbornly cryptic people horror temper piece that makes use of imprecise ambiguity as its major forex.
Director Bryn Chainey spends a lot of his first-ever function movie circling a promising theme that we’re fairly positive has one thing to do with sound being a primordial means by which to excavate hidden trauma from a troubled soul. Nevertheless, his thesis suffocates beneath a irritating refusal to drop sufficient crumbs to maintain us invested in each the characters and in deducing the bigger level Chainey is making. What we’re left with, nonetheless, is so charming to have a look at, and take heed to, that had Chainey been rather less opaque, Rabbit Lure would have been greater than only a calling card movie from a promising director.
Working with cinematographer Andreas Johannessen, Chainey gently vegetation us in a stunning Welsh setting that evokes a wealthy and plush Celtic fairy story. He cleverly units his story in 1976, a pre-digital world the place the report needles, the old-fashioned stereo knobs and the frayed edges of the albums in Darcy’s assortment add a tactile really feel that’s heat but barely mysterious. However even with the evocative visuals, Chainey is much less concerned with what Daphne and Darcy see and contact than in what they hear. Darcy roams in regards to the Celtic moors along with his audio gear, recording the elemental sounds of earth and sky, which he takes again to Daphne for doable use in her experimental music. Like many of the data conveyed right here, Chainey offers solely the slightest of hints in regards to the state of Daphne and Darcy’s marriage. Neither one discusses their lack of kids, an possibility which may be off the desk due to Darcy’s recurring nightmare that gestures in the direction of the likelihood that he was abused as a baby.
A number of Questions, Not Many Solutions
Rabbit Lure
2.5
/5
- Launch Date
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January 24, 2025
- Runtime
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97 Minutes
- Director
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Bryn Chainey
- Writers
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Bryn Chainey
- Producers
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Daniel Noah, Elijah Wooden, Adrian Politowski, Lawrence Inglee, Nadia Khamlichi, Dev Patel, Elisa Lleras, Martin Metz, Alex Ashworth, Sean Marley, Stephen Kelliher, Sierra Garcia, Kyle Stroud, Sophie Inexperienced, Nessa McGill
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Rosy McEwen
Daphne Davenport
Certainly, Rabbit Lure is so stuffed with unresolved hints and gestures that we surprise if Chainey actually has a deal with on how they match collectively, or if his thematic attain simply exceeded his storytelling grasp. The style he’s working in is basically people horror, although he leans on the previous way more than the latter. This comes into creepy focus after Darcy steps right into a circle of mushrooms and passes out. Quickly after, he meets a mysterious, anonymous and genderless 12-year-old (the skin-crawlingly efficient actress Jade Croot, cosplaying an elfin Barry Keoghan) who seems to be sprung from Center-Earth. The kid slowly and stealthily integrates into Daphne and Darcy’s marriage, displaying up each day, taking lengthy walks with Darcy and having her face painted by Daphne. Quickly, the kid’s conduct turns into extra ominous and passive-aggressively threatening; he warns the couple about evil faeries, kills a rabbit as tribute and picks on the scab of their childless marriage by calling Daphne “mother.”
Whereas that is definitely a singular method for Darcy to beat the first impediment the story has set out for him, it isn’t the cleanest, and ready for clues turns into virtually tiresome. Daphne and Darcy by no means ask the kid essentially the most primary questions on its id, which might have been fantastic had Chainey chosen to sacrifice character logic within the service of delivering a giant thematic knockout. However his storytelling is so obtuse and his characters are so missing in definition that the dots wrestle to attach. Solely in the course of the movie’s devastating closing shot are we pressured to rethink the whole lot that got here earlier than it.
One other factor Rabbit Lure lacks is scares, which, because it seems, is considered one of Chainey’s smarter decisions. The world he has created is extremely intoxicating and leaning into soar scares, soar cuts and stingers would solely break such a meticulously crafted spell.
Sound as a Character
Rabbit Lure is ostensibly a movie with solely three characters, however there’s truly a fourth: sound. Sound designer Graham Reznick and composer Lucrecia Dalt create an astonishingly efficient aural setting that must be skilled both in a theater with an appropriately decked-out sound system or at residence on high quality headphones. These sounds, generally refined, generally punishing, transfer Daphne and Darcy’s arcs ahead as a lot because the dialogue does. It is the first method during which they specific their need, as when Darcy runs his microphone over his spouse’s physique as a method to join together with her on an virtually primal degree. The meticulous sound combine additionally offers intelligent clues to a personality’s interior state; the rain pours down when the kid begs Daphne and Darcy to present it a reputation. Nevertheless it’s not likely the kid pleading to be named; it is Darcy’s silent, buried trauma that’s in determined want of articulation.
Chainey’s insistence on ambiguity requires actors who can maintain us tethered to their characters, lest the entire thing devolve into an train in fashion. Patel and particularly McEwen (so good in 2022’s Blue Jean) subtly manipulate their our bodies and their facial expressions to finest make sure that Darcy and Daphne learn as folks, not constructs. However there’s solely a lot they will do in the course of the closing stretch, when Chainey overestimates how far he can push the symbolism earlier than the viewers, as an alternative of contemplating what all of it means, considers trying out as an alternative.
Rabbit Lure has ambiance and elegance to spare, and Chainey is a director to look at. In the long run, he tries too onerous, and but not onerous sufficient, to present that means to strains like, “If you hear a sound, you change into its residence. Your physique is the home it haunts.” However he does have some extent: Our trauma is inside us. We simply should hear for it.
Rabbit Lure, from Magnet Releasing, opens in theaters September 12