
“The Power of Sounds, Spells, and the Sublime Unknown”: Editor Brett W. Bachman on Rabbit Trap

Set in 1976, writer-director Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap follows a couple (Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen) who decide to move to a house in the Welsh countryside. Musicians by trade, they unwittingly unleash an eldritch horror through the songs that they make, culminating in an eerie, unnamed child showing up at their doorstep.
Below, Bachman speaks about the two dominant ideas kept in mind while cutting Rabbit Trap, the intense sound design process and the importance of trusting one’s audience.
See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of Rabbit Trap? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Bachman: I’ve been lucky to have a long relationship with Daniel Noah and Elijah Wood, two of the partners at SpectreVision. We’ve worked together for over ten years on multiple features, including Mandy, Color Out of Space and Cooties. I was sent the script and deck to Rabbit Trap years ago, and I was quite gripped by it. The script had elements of surrealism and folklore while being character-oriented. The creative deck that Bryn Chainey (writer/director) had assembled conveyed that he was looking to do something phantasmagoric—hypnotic, lurid in sound design and music. SpectreVision set up a meeting for Bryn and I and it immediately felt like a good fit. I shared the task with editor Sam Sneade, who had done an incredible job finding core emotional moments of the film from our three very talented actors, Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, and Jade Croot.
Filmmaker: In terms of advancing Rabbit Trap from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?
Bachman: The film is set in the Welsh countryside, and is focused around local legends and mythology. Events occur throughout the film that begin to tip into the paranormal, and we wanted the audience to experience these paranormal events subjectively as the two main characters do: the confusion if you started to experience lapses in time, or felt like you were going under a trance. Later on in the film, strange occurrences become fantasy with physical transformations, magic, etc. We wanted to retain that sense of dread and befuddlement that would naturally occur to you if you experienced something like that. We wanted the film to put a spell over you.
Therefore, there were two dominant ideas that we had while editing Rabbit Trap. The first was: how much can we play with atmosphere and subjectivity? As the film progresses, the characters undergo these trance-like experiences, resulting in disorientation, confusion, and uncertainty. What can we do in the edit to draw the audience into this puzzling experience with a confident, stable hand? We wanted to build a dream-like experience for the audience that would mystify, intrigue, and delight them. The second question, which existed largely because of the enigmatic subjective nature of the material was: what is ambiguous versus what is confusing? In other words, when is the audience checking out of the movie due to lack of understanding, as opposed to being drawn into the narrative because it demands they draw their own conclusions? There’s the bad type of audience response, i.e. confusion – and the type of response you want in a film like this: mystery, suspense, intrigue of the unknown. I liked to reference three films while I was editing: Don’t Look Now, Berberian Sound Studio, and Mulholland Drive. Watching these films feel like dream experiences, and they confidently ask a lot of their audiences without breaking their hypnotic spell.
Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Bachman: Smaller friends and family screenings were crucial to developing the edit. Bryn and I would undergo tons of experimentation with non-linear components of the film; montages, time dilation, intercuts, scenes would be moved around, or re appropriated to a different area of the movie. We had a few nightmare sequences that constantly fluctuated in length and content. The role of sound design in this film is immense. We oscillated between tranquil nature scenes, analog tape machines, surreal drones, and ethereal sounds of the sublime; it was a very heavy lift. Sound had such a dominant role to convey tone, mood, and story in this film, likely more than any other film I’ve done. I would estimate about 50% of my time editing went towards early sound design experiments, attempting to lay the narrative blueprints for where Graham Reznick (sound designer) would ultimately take the film when we handed it over to him, and his work—in conjunction with our composer Lucrecia Dalt—is astonishing. The film underwent a long stage where it was very avant-garde, and we really had to rely on smaller test audiences to tell us either; “this is strange, ethereal, and beautiful even though I don’t fully comprehend it,” or the opposite, “I have no idea what is going on and I checked out of the movie.” We really needed those smaller test screenings to find the best balance of intentional ambiguity versus the dreaded confusion. When can you let a film like this relish in mystery, versus when do you need to simplify? When should we be pulling back and being more straightforward with the story?
Generally, when we needed to find focus and clarity for the audience, we would reduce. We lost several great scenes and moments we loved because we found they obfuscated the desired idea or emotion we needed the scene or beat to convey. Sometimes those beautiful, lyrical moments needed to go because they confused a larger scene or sequence. Few things come to mind: we had a great scene where Rosy McEwen’s character is confessing via monologue her greatest fear to The Child character, but we could never find a perfect spot in the movie for it. It never had an obvious narrative cause and effect, and from a thematic stand point, it never fully complemented a specific area, so ultimately, we cut it. We had a lot more cryptic voice overs from Jade Croot’s character, but found there was a certain point where if we heard too much of them, the poetic diction became too difficult to follow—so we simplified them and cut them down to half their original length.
One of the notes we got from these friends and family screenings was that the film was more preoccupied with theme and character versus plot, and Bryn felt very proud of that. He wanted to construct an emotional experience first and foremost. Making a film that relishes in ambiguity and dream logic is a tricky balancing act. You have to work with your director to make something unique and bold—but you also need to listen to your test audience members of trusted friends and family when they tell you that things may need to be simplified.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Bachman: After I graduated AFI Conservatory, it was actually the producers over at SpectreVision that gave me my first break. I was 24 years old when their former head of production, Josh Waller, hired me to edit his directorial debut Raze. From there, I met his producing partners Daniel and Elijah as they had just started SpectreVision. They wanted to make films in the genre space that they felt weren’t in the public eye in 2013. We made several films together during that time, a lot under the SpectreVision/Company X banner (Cooties, Bitch, Daniel Isn’t Real, Color Out of Space) and a few outside of the company label (Max Rose, McCanick, Camino.)
In 2017, we made Mandy with Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough, which premiered to acclaim at Sundance. The reception of that film led to some new career opportunities, and I was fortunate to book another film with Cage, 2021’s Pig, directed by Michael Sarnoski. Since then, I’ve had the great fortune of working with some fantastic filmmakers, Josh Ruben, Mike Flanagan, Macon Blair, plus several more. I’m drawn to editing that utilizes subjectivity, strong point of view, takes risks, and feels playful.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Bachman: Avid Media Composer.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Bachman: Without spoiling the ending, there was a significant plot reversal in the last fifteen minutes of the movie that we continuously revised. There is a drastic event which consistently confused a substantial portion of our test audiences, and we couldn’t seem to find a version that pleased a clear majority. No matter what we did to those last fifteen minutes, there was always a section of the audience that we lost. Either they didn’t buy what transpired, or they felt like they missed something, or they felt like there was some sort of deus ex machina going on. We were considering an ADR line to try and fix the issue—and we were almost going to go that route, knowing it there was a good shot it may not fully work—until writer/director David Bruckner watched the edit, and very generously gave us an idea. Based on his feedback, we reinstated a previously deleted scene, reappropriated (recut) it to fit this specific area of the movie, and found that it was the missing lynchpin to the finale.
Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?
Bachman: I hope audiences will respond to the entire crafts team; it’s incredibly rare to work on a film that looks and sounds this good. Andreas Johannessen FNF, our cinematographer, shot the film on 35mm, and it has this rugged, grounded lensing that is so immersive, pivoting between grand forest vistas in the countryside, and tiny bedrooms. I had the pleasure of getting Lucrecia Dalt’s music very early in the process, so Bryn and I never needed to utilize a single note of temp score. Her music was so instructive for establishing a unified tone and ambience at all stages of the edit. Graham Reznick and Brent Kiser, or sound designers, made the movie sound absolutely stunning; aside from our three actors, I think it’s the other star of the movie. This is a movie largely about the power of sounds, spells, and the sublime unknown, and they were up for the task.
Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has Rabbit Trap taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?
Bachman: Trust your audience. They’ll praise you for making something unique and bold, but you need to earn their trust. They love to do some work—they love the mystery of the unknown….to an extent. If you aren’t getting the desired emotional response to a moment, try simplifying it, allow them to catch up.