By Bailey Pennick
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. We decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!
Like so many debut features, mine grew - in a very wiggly, meandering way - from the seed of a short film, says Bryn Chainey. An intriguing introduction, fitting for the writer-director behind Rabbit Trap. The feature, premiering in the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, has audiences wandering through mysterious presences, repressed memories, and a couple's evolving relationship, all against the isolating backdrop of Wales. You can smell the moss as Darcy (Dev Patel) walks through the woods making field recordings for his wife's new album. You can feel the earth beneath your fingernails, even as the facade of reality begins to crumble around the pair - and before our eyes.
This jarring mix of terra firma and mystical extremes is all part of the wiggly journey that brought Chainey to his sensory tale. While living in Berlin during my twenties, I made a short (Moritz and the Woodwose) about a boy who's in denial of a painful truth and it takes the intervention of a folkloric being to help him face the dirt, he explains. In the decade since making that film, I've recognized how much it was actually about my own inner child and need for healing, and Rabbit Trap was a chance to dig even deeper into that soil, down where it scares me the most.
The British-Australian filmmaker and his Rabbit Trap collaborators aren't afraid to get their hands dirty in pursuit of the story's truth, and the result is a film equally haunting and heartbreaking. Art's funny like that: you can concoct the most far-out scenarios and characters, wrap them in texture and imagination and abstraction, but ultimately you can't outrun yourself, he continues. Especially not the part of you that's yearning to be heard, seen, and held.
Read on to learn more about Chainey's humble beginnings in filmmaking, the awe-inspiring commitment of his team, and who he wants to reach with the lush, lingering Rabbit Trap.
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By Bailey Pennick
