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.
Tell us why and how you got into filmmaking?
My first loves were writing and acting. Joining a theater school in England, and another one when we emigrated to Australia, honestly saved my life as a teenager: it was the first time I’d found my people and a safe place to direct whatever energy was inside of me. I missed a lot of high school because of mental health troubles — and nearly failed entirely — but nothing stopped me from attending acting classes.
Not having grown up in an artistic family, I didn’t fathom that filmmaking was a thing real people did, but in my efforts to avoid any traditionally academic subject at high school, I joined the film studies class. I was immediately hooked. Film included everything I loved about theater, but without the stage fright, which I had buckets of. Plus it tied in my other interests like music, art and nature. By the time I graduated high school, filmmaking had taken over as my goal for the future and I haven’t looked back since.
Why does this story need to be told now?
“Men would rather (insert anything here) than go to therapy.” This meme is, sadly, right on the money and points to something that needs urgent, attentive care. Culturally men have developed very poor tools for examining their wounds, let alone dealing with them, and that’s hurting everyone: themselves, their families, their societies, even nature. And that’s kind of the crux of this film.
Darcy isn’t an image of your typical repressed male: he’s a bit of a hippy; he’s creative, sensitive, supportive, submissive. However, he’s running on shame — the source of which wasn’t his fault — and his inability to deal with this is festering away at his relationship. Luckily he exists inside a story which operates with the rules of folklore and myth, where nature is conscious and active, and as my producer Lawrence so beautifully put it: “nature will not abandon her children” (a line that ended up in the film).
Rabbit Trap is set in a very specific context — pioneering electronic musicians that have retreated to remote Wales in the 1970s — but beyond that, we tried to create a story that lives in that mythopoetic space where fairytales and folktales live. Like James Hillman says, “myth never happened but always is.” My take is that stories of the soul — the natural, the supernatural, the unconscious — are universal and timeless: always urgent, always patient, leading you far away back to yourself.
Tell us an anecdote about casting or working with your actors.
For the role of the child, we met with dozens of young actors — boys, girls and enbies — many of whom were exceptional and would have been amazing to work with, but then Jade Croot came along. She was a wildcard right at the end of casting and honestly she threw us for a loop. Were we really going to cast a 25-year-old woman in a part originally written for a teenage boy? Should we flip the character’s gender? Should we make it ambiguous? Should we make it unimportant? Argh!
As a team we rolled it over and decided that you don’t find a talent like Jade and not cast her. She brought something so hauntingly vulnerable, so urgent and emotionally hungry, that it elevated the character away from “creepy child” and into a raw nerve of neediness and longing. That was more unpredictable and unsettling to me. And her range, my god: within a moment she could flip from Oliver Twist to Hannibal Lecter. We knew we’d ultimately lose some of the audience, who would be too distracted by the casting, but decided this was the most interesting choice so went for it.
But anyway, my anecdote is not about that but a moment during preproduction. Jade had been anxious about having her hair cut, since it’d been waist-length for years, and honestly her nerves made us nervous too.
“Can we go shorter? A bit more? Is that OK?”
Bit by bit the stylist cut it back, from the waist, to the shoulders, to the chin, to the ears… but these tiny increments weren’t helping the nerves and honestly wasn’t working aesthetically: it just looked too much like a haircut. Her character needed to look like some semi-feral valley kid that had cut his own hair with a stolen pair of rusty shears.
Finally I handed Jade the scissors and asked her to attack it herself. She was timid at first — very mindful, very demure — but then something took over, she cackled, and went wild. Within a few minutes the deed was done, the floor was a mess, and we all stood back to admire her handiwork.
At that moment, Jade burst into tears.
“Oh fuck,” I thought. “We’ve pushed her too far. She’s regretting ever agreeing to do this role. She’s walking.” But then she looked up and was beaming. “There he is,” she explained. “The boy. I wasn’t sure I could find him, but… there he is.”
She then called us together for a group cwtch (Welsh for hug). It felt like a family was born in that moment, the birth of a new person we were all so excited to meet and nurture and put through some horrible experiences.
Describe who you want Rabbit Trap to reach
If fear is the mind-killer then shame is the soul-killer, and that’s the scariest thing our film’s characters are up against. During rehearsal one day, Rosy came in with a beautifully succinct, hope-giving truth bomb: shame dies on exposure. The implication is that doubt, guilt, self-loathing, feelings of dysfunctionality and otherness — these live in the shadows you allow them; they feed on silence, on pain being left unspoken.
Aside from fans of weird fiction and folklore, I’d love our film to reach anyone that needs encouragement to be brave and open up, or to help someone they love to do so. Listening is a powerful magic that can’t be conducted alone. It takes at least two people — to speak, to listen, to coax shame from the shadows, and kill it with love.
What was a big challenge you faced while making Rabbit Trap?
“We had too much time and money” said no filmmaker ever and I’m joining the club. We shot the entire film in 20 days, on 35mm film, in remote locations in Yorkshire, under an almost constant torrential downpour. The only way this was possible was because our crew was truly dedicated and had an exceptional spirit: the amount of enthusiasm, community, joy, focus, humour, and creativity on display was rare and awe-inspiring.
Films are lasting artistic legacies, what do you want yours to say?
I think all my films have been circling the same contradictory longings: to connect and to disappear; to exist in the natural world but also in an internal landscape; to value vulnerability as much as bravery. Ultimately I’d like my films to say it’s OK, you’re not alone in having a weird, bewildered, paradoxical soul. And, maybe, right there, suspended in the tension of your contradictory longings, there’s something to be learned.
What is something that all filmmakers should keep in mind in order to become better cinematic storytellers?
Personally I’d love more sensuality in films: not only in an erotic way, but in the tactility of the senses. There’s so much supremacy given to visuals and performance, which I get, since we’re primarily visual, interpersonal beings, but I feel that’s something television does best. When a movie boils down to people standing around in a room talking, I ask why isn’t this TV or theater instead?
Movies are in a position to do something different, something elemental — more connected to the weird reality of being a body, not just a mind. Stories and character can be tied to the physical experience of existing: we aren’t separate to nature, we are an expression of it; it’s the disconnect that’s got us into this climate mess.
So I want more films that make my nose twitch with imagination, which makes my skin tingle and throb and burn. Give me texture, give me smell, give me something to taste. Let me experience time and space as forces of nature, not just vessels for plot. Hit me with vibrations of sound and light that aren’t tied to language. Give me mud and rain and fire and fur. I want films that feel like they’ve sprung directly from the earth, not a computer screen, and could drag us back into it if we let them.
Who are your creative heroes?
Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, Jade Croot, Lucie Red, Andreas Johannessen, Graham Reznick, Lucrecia Dalt, Brett Bachmann, Sam Sneade, Daniel Noah, Lawrence Inglee, Elijah Wood, Frankie Fox.
What was the last thing you saw that you wish you made?
The Substance, but there’s no way I could have made something so perfect. What a mad, devious film that is. It’s a blast. The original screenplay for Rabbit Trap had more body horror than it ended up with, and an ending strangely similar to The Substance, but we couldn’t go in that direction because of costs and, honestly, a lot of pushback against how unhinged and disgusting things got. Now that The Substance has happened, I’m hoping more people will trust that the grotesque and sublime can live together.
What’s your favorite film that has come from the Sundance Institute or Festival?
Mandy by Panos Cosmatos. That film blew a very specific horn of Abraxas for me and changed the course of my life. It only screened for one night in Sydney, where I was living at the time. I went in basically blind, having only seen the poster, expecting a wacky Nicolas Cage action horror, which it was, but it was also a stone cold masterpiece — a primal howl of a film. It was cosmic and beautiful and disgusting and utterly drenched in melancholy, just oozing with the stuff. I felt traumatized and inspired in a very personal way.
Whichever beautiful weirdos had made the film, and trusted their director that much, were the ones I wanted to produce Rabbit Trap. That turned out to be SpectreVision (Elijah Wood, Daniel Noah, Lawrence Inglee). It took a few years to get my script directly into their hands but when we finally connected, we clicked immediately. They’ve championed this project through thick and thin, and their creative integrity is crystal in its purity. Truly special people. I still haven’t met Panos and will probably crumble when I do.
If you weren’t a filmmaker, what would you be doing?
This is the first time in my life I’ve been able to make a living from writing and directing fiction. Other jobs I’ve done: making corporate videos, teacher, librarian, bartender, DJ (Berlin lol), retail, climbing supervisor, children’s storyteller, and that guy in a cartoon animal suit handing out flyers in the mall. You wouldn’t believe how many people are compelled to punch a 6-foot plush monkey in the dick.
Tell us about your history with Sundance Institute. When was the first time you engaged with us? Why did you want your film to premiere/screen with us?
This will be my first time doing anything Sundance related and I can’t wait to be at the Festival. I hear it’s a welcoming and down-to-earth place, so I’m looking forward to making new friends and just celebrating with my team after so many years of work.
Who was the first person you told when you learned you got into the Sundance Film Festival?
I was told in no uncertain terms to “TELL NO ONE” so I only shared the news with my actors, heads of department, and a few friends and acquaintances and strangers on the street. Oh, and my dog Albie who was originally meant to be in the film, but his part got cut during a rewrite. Officially, he is boycotting the film, but deep down he knows it was for the best.
Why is filmmaking important to you? Why is it important to the world?
How lucky are we to live in this little blip of human history in which movies exist? Dreams projected on a wall? All the intrigue and delight and mystery of existing, without the actual peril? Moving sculptures of time and light and sound and story? Hot, buttered popcorn so salty it’ll make your veins throb? What a time to be alive.
