I am always grateful when Carol Borden of The Cultural Gutter tells me I should check something out. She knows my tastes pretty well and when she said I had to see Rabbit Trap, I knew I would need to do so (see her write up at the link). It hits a lot of my favourite things: fairy lore, folk horror, sound exploration and design — theremin! Dev Patel! Whose Darcy is ably joined by Rosy McEwen as Daphne–I generally dislike main characters names that start with the same letter but it has a point here–and Jade Croot as a feerlie child who appears one day, curiously observing Darcy making field recordings.

I’ll link to the trailer here; do go watch it if this sounds like something that appeals to you as it is spoilers from here on. Oh! And Lucrecia Dalt’s soundtrack played on vintage electronic instruments available at Bandcamp.

Writer/director Bryn Chainey throws you into an aural and tactile world familiar to any folk horror fan — a remote part of the Welsh countryside, with no near neighbours but plenty of audible wildlife and flora. A special love for the tactile pleasures of moss, especially that thick spongy kind that grows in Scotland and Wales and the north; while I will probably obsess over the aural aspects of this film they are part of what makes this such a rich haptic experience. Chainey’s film makes you feel like you have fallen into a soft bed of moss — until you suddenly fear you have fallen too far and now you’re sinking into the damp cavern below it and it’s dark and there’s too much water and how will you get out?

The sound design is brilliant. The opening sequences where we see Darcy field recording and Daphne experimenting with sound and sequencers — and yes, a theremin! — offer a brilliant and fascinating entrée into their lives; her niche fame and success, his haunted past: a nightmare with shadows and open-eyed nightmares. They are a beautiful and slightly melancholic twosome cuddles together in happy chosen exile or retreat. The bath is both a haptic moment and quickly symbolic too–the erotic and intimate ambience later complicated by its new use for a child.

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again.

The relationship between hares, rabbits, and magic go way back. In her confessions, Scots witch Isobel Gowdie recited the above spell for how she would shapeshift and cause havoc among her neighbours. The mysterious child who appears in the film, furtively watching Darcy, then fleeing, then sticking like a burr, wildly curious about everything, explains how to catch a rabbit using a trap. You have to know what it’s hungry for; this is the key upon which the story hinges. The child being played by an adult (if petite) woman gives an extra uncanny edge. If you call someone a boy, a boy they become. Whatever they might be — and yes, the implication of this child who comes from a long way off and yet seems always alone and increasingly eager to join Daphne and Darcy’s home seems more than a little unsettling.

Did your mother or some other wise woman not tell you never to step in a fairy ring?

The rabbit trap is used literally; they have a special resonance for me because we had rabbit traps at our cabin up in northern Michigan. In earlier times they were probably used literally, too. We set them, then used sticks to spring them, delighting in the snaps. I think my older brother stuck his foot in one once (in a shoe) but they’re so small you can’t get much more than your toes in (he was not hurt as he had leather shoes on, but it sure did pinch). For me there was a momentary jump out of the narrative when Chekov’s gun rabbit trap was sprung (‘That’s too big!’) but it was momentary.

I’m told some viewers were disappointed that there was not more overt horror — no mangling, blood, horror [really more folk gothic than horror] — and yet, there is such a pit-of-the-stomach fear that things will go wrong, are going wrong, especially once we slip into the subterranean paths, beyond just my knee-jerk claustrophobia. When the child wants them both, it’s a slow wheedle. When Darcy with his own dark shadows sees danger in the strange visitor, the child turns against him, tells him he has something rotten inside him. Does he want to infect Daphne, too? No, let her be. Let the child have her.

She has her own darkness too, but it is less harmful. Grief rather than pain. Why don’t you have children, the child asks and she cries. We suspect that she has lost one — perhaps that is the real reason for their withdrawal to these liminal lands. The seemingly innocent child and its feral need for a home away from the darkness it knows pulls on that loose thread, suggesting there is a way to knit up that ravelling sleeve.

Gifts are always an issue with the daoine sídhe and their ilk. Who gives, who receives, how is it received — and if you waste a gift or fail to honour it or return the favour, woe betide you. The ancient rules of hospitality often exist to honour and to circumvent these even older rules of interaction (see Havamál for example). A gift wasted is a slap in the face. And dangerous. And the dark calls out so plaintively.

The communication between Darcy and Daphne is so beautiful. They don’t even know if it will work, but they understand one another. And the child comes into their house and they feed and bathe and clothe this creature. And the house gives over to moss and mold and bugs and snails, and there’s a seductive power to giving in to the creeping flora and fauna — like Keats, half in love with easeful death. But they do want each other and they do want to end the haunting of their lives with kindness — and okay, a bit of fungus. Yellow, liquid, fungus.

They survive. Thrive even — their wounds brought to light begin to heal. I need to watch it again because it is so immersive I cannot remember everything. As if I would anyway. I never remember everything. That’s why you always have to watch again.

But hey — don’t step in fairy rings! And mean it when you give a gift. Careful with y Tylwyth Teg…

MORITZ AND THE WOODWOSE (2013) trailer for a short by Bryn Chainey

EDIT to add: Jade Croot was a child actor and I think that adds a lot to her portrayal of the uncanny child — that ability to act as a child or as adults expect (direct) a child to act.