There are a number of moments in Rabbit Entice when the boundaries between sound and area, dream and actuality, start to fray. Sound is just not merely a component of the movie’s environment — it’s its driving power, the unseen terror urgent in on the psyche of its characters. Bryn Chainey’s debut function is a folks horror movie, an erotic thriller, and an experimental meditation on the connection between notion, reminiscence, and worry. At its core, Rabbit Entice explores the eerie interaction between human connection, creative obsession, and nature’s skill to withstand management.
‘Rabbit Entice’ Is a Sonic Descent Into the Uncanny
Rabbit Entice
4
/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
Solid
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Rosy McEwen
Daphne Davenport
- Makes use of sound as each a storytelling system and a supply of existential dread, creating an immersive environment.
- Each leads deliver layers of emotional depth, making the movie as a lot about their marriage as it’s concerning the supernatural.
- Merges the sensual with the terrifying, exploring the intersection of worry, want, and creative obsession.
- The strain builds step by step, which can not swimsuit audiences on the lookout for a extra fast sense of horror.
- These anticipating clear supernatural explanations or leap scares could discover its ambiguity unsettling moderately than satisfying.
Set in 1976 Wales, Rabbit Entice follows Daphne (Rosy McEwen, of the masterpiece Blue Jean), an experimental musician, and her emotionally withdrawn husband, Darcy (Dev Patel). Darcy is a area recording artist who spends his days capturing the panorama’s uncooked, unfiltered sounds. He collects recordings from the neighboring woods however appears disinterested in the whole lot else, retreating additional into his personal thoughts. Daphne, alternatively, distorts and manipulates these recordings, crafting eerie, avant-garde compositions. Their inventive dynamic seems symbiotic — till an uninvited visitor, a wierd younger rabbit trapper (Jade Croot), disrupts their fragile peace.
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The kid inserts themself into the couple’s each day existence with an unnerving sense of possession over each the land and their lives. The kid’s presence is inexplicable but inescapable, not a ghost however one thing way more terrifying — an enfant horrible whose innocence is a mere façade for one thing manipulative, maybe even supernatural. They speaks in riddles: “When you catch the rabbit, you catch the message.” What message? What rabbit? In Rabbit Entice, that means is elusive, worry is instinctual, and sound is an unrelenting power that is each inventive and damaging.
‘Blow Out’ Meets ‘Berberian Sound Studio’: A Cinematic Lineage of Sonic Horror
From its opening frames, Rabbit Entice establishes itself inside the custom of sonic horror — movies that use sound as each a weapon and a portal to the unconscious. Chainey attracts from the sonic paranoia of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and the psychotic auditory collapse of Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012), the place recording expertise turns into an extension of insanity. The movie additionally bears the unnerving tonal precision of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and its sense that the whole lot is barely off-kilter, that the world has been tilted only a diploma past pure.
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Lucrecia Dalt’s experimental rating reinforces this sense of unease, mixing digital murmurs with natural textures, distorting actuality by means of sound. In a very unnerving sequence, vocal waves seem on the display, their distortions shaping the environment extra successfully than any visible leap scare. Sound turns into not only a thematic software, however the very structure of worry.
This strategy additionally permits Rabbit Entice to lean into one thing uncommon inside horror — a sensorial eroticism. Daphne’s fascination with sound manifests as one thing nearly sensual; the extra distorted and unsettling the world round them turns into, the extra she is drawn to it, aroused by the collapse of order. Darcy, in the meantime, is slowly unraveled by it, his personal unconscious spilling into the encompassing setting. Their relationship doesn’t erode within the face of terror; as a substitute, it mutates, shifting into one thing primal and unstated.
The Enfant Horrible Trope: A Little one as a Harbinger of Psychological Decay
Horror cinema has lengthy relied on unsettling little one figures, however Rabbit Entice resists the trope of the demonic or ghostly little one and as a substitute embraces the enfant horrible archetype. The kid’s presence is an lively disruption of the grownup world, exposing the characters’ fears, weaknesses, and hidden needs.
The rabbit trapper is just not merely eerie — the kid is confident, dominant, and oddly clever past the years they exist in. Relatively than terrorizing Darcy and Daphne outright, the kid exerts management over them in quieter, extra insidious methods, shifting the ability dynamics of the family. The kid is each an extension of the land and an agent of dysfunction, bending the couple’s will till they not appear to belong to themselves. The way in which the kid speaks and strikes means that they know one thing they should not. Just like the rabbit caught in a lure, Daphne and Darcy turn into ensnared by their very own entanglement with nature, with their previous, with themselves.
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The Haunting of the Physique, The Haunting of the Thoughts
A lot of the movie’s horror stems from the concept your physique is a haunted home. The previous lives inside you, shaping each breath, each sound you make. In one of many movie’s most hanging sequences, Darcy sleepwalks, whispering fragments of a childhood reminiscence, a second of trauma that has remained dormant, ready to be unearthed. The extra the couple engages with the unusual, sonic disturbances round them, the extra their very own reminiscences bleed into the current.
This collapse of time and identification is distinctly current within the movie’s cinematography, which shifts from grounded naturalism to dreamlike abstraction. Shadows stretch unnaturally. Gentle glints between the timber. The presence of the rabbit — the movie’s central metaphor — turns into increasingly more pronounced, its significance left intentionally ambiguous. Killing a rabbit, in any case, appears like a spell.
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At its core, Rabbit Entice is about connections — between folks, between previous and current, between people and the pure world. The couple’s creative course of mirrors the movie’s themes: Darcy information sound, making an attempt to seize actuality as it’s, whereas Daphne distorts it, shaping it into one thing new, one thing unrecognizable. Their relationship is an extension of this similar stress, the will to protect versus the urge to rework.
Ambiguity and Secrecy Obfuscate the Horror
Rabbit Entice is just not a movie about what’s seen, however what’s heard, what lingers, distorts, and reverberates within the silence. It’s a horror movie that refuses simple solutions, a examine of a wedding that unravels within the wake of an unknowable power. Chainey’s debut is an experiment in psychological decay, a meditation on how we challenge our personal fears onto the unknown. The paradox concerned (and the slow-burn nature of the movie) could annoy horror followers greater than please them; it is an arthouse horror film, in any case.
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Like one of the best horror movies, Rabbit Entice leaves the viewers with extra questions than solutions — not about its plot, however about themselves. It doesn’t demand comprehension. It calls for give up. Rabbit Entice premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition. Watch this area for updates about its launch.