There's a house in Wales that doesn't want you there. That's the vibe Bryn Chainey is selling in Rabbit Trap, and honestly, we're buying.
The film, which crept into theaters on September 12, 2025, has been quietly burrowing into horror fans' watchlists ever since. And with an 88-minute runtime, it wastes absolutely no time getting under your skin. This is the kind of movie that understands something fundamental about folk horror: the scariest thing isn't the monster at the door. It's the fact that you opened it.
The setup is deceptively simple. Dev Patel plays Darcy Davenport, a musician who relocates with his wife Daphne (Rosy McEwen) to a remote house in Wales. You know, the classic "let's get away from it all and focus on our art" move that has never once gone wrong in the history of cinema. Except this time, the art fights back.
Darcy and Daphne start making music in their new isolated home, and their creative output accidentally disturbs some ancient local folk magic. Because of course it does. The result? A nameless child - played with maximum creep factor by Jade Croot - shows up at their door with an agenda. She doesn't want to borrow a cup of sugar. She wants to infiltrate their lives. And she's not taking no for an answer.
Nicholas Sampson rounds out the cast as a mysterious figure called The Shadow, which is exactly the kind of character name that tells you everything and nothing at the same time. In folk horror, the less you know, the better.
Chainey, making his feature directorial mark here, is working in a rich tradition. The "outsiders move to a remote British location and immediately regret it" subgenre has given us everything from The Wicker Man to The Witch to Midsommar, and Rabbit Trap is smartly positioning itself in that lineage while adding its own wrinkle: the couple isn't just trespassing on someone else's land. They're trespassing on someone else's sound.
That's the twist that makes this one interesting. Music as an invasive force. Creativity as a form of colonization. The Davenports aren't malicious - they're just making art in a place that was already speaking its own language. And the ancient folk magic doesn't appreciate the interruption. What arrives at their door isn't a punishment exactly. It's a correction. A rebalancing. An answer to a question they never should have asked.
Dev Patel continues his fascinating post-Slumdog trajectory here. The guy has spent years refusing to be boxed into any single genre, bouncing from Lion to The Green Knight to Monkey Man, and now he's doing intimate folk horror with a 88-minute runtime. That's a choice. It's also exactly the kind of choice that makes him one of the more interesting actors working today. He's not chasing franchises. He's chasing scripts that feel dangerous.
Rosy McEwen, meanwhile, has been building a reputation as one of the UK's most compelling screen presences, and Daphne Davenport gives her plenty to work with - a woman whose creative partnership with her husband becomes the very thing that threatens to destroy them.
And then there's Croot as The Child. No name. No backstory. Just a kid standing at the door who won't leave. In folk horror, that's scarier than any jump scare could ever be.
The film currently sits at a 5.607/10 on TMDb, which is the kind of polarized number that suggests people are either completely on its wavelength or it left them cold. That's fine. Folk horror has never been for everyone. It's for the people who like their horror slow, atmospheric, and rooted in something so old it doesn't have a name.
Rabbit Trap isn't trying to reinvent the genre. It's trying to burrow into it. And with its Welsh setting, its musician protagonists, and its child-shaped threat, it's found a fresh angle on a familiar nightmare: the fear that the place you chose to escape to might have been better off without you.
If that sounds like your kind of trap, it's waiting. Just don't make any music.
