MY CALL: Not really sure what I just watched. It’s slow, awkwardly interesting, bizarre, and sad. MORE MOVIES LIKE Starve Acre: Maybe Lamb (2021) or Don’t Look Now (1973).
A quiet, rural couple doesn’t know what to do when their son is involved in a troubling incident mutilating an animal at school. The boy refers to the voice of a rabbit speaking to him, one of dark local folklore. Shortly thereafter, their son dies from an asthma attack. With time, the couple’s tensions build, leading to doubt in one another, distancing, grief and fixation. And then the boy’s father Richard (Matt Smith; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) discovers the “the rabbit” buried on their property, with other components of the troubling folklore.
The delicateness with which Richard unearths, excavates, cleans and reassembles a rabbit skeleton is odd gripping. The rabbit skeleton slowly begins to reconstitute (a la Hellraiser), with the beginnings of nervous and cardiovascular tendrils extending and connecting across the bones; and then sinew and more. Or is it all a delusion? Apparently not. But does freeing this rabbit free them of their problems?
A sort of séance reveals a presence most unwelcome. The film becomes more about Richard’s investigation into this rabbit, and Juliette (Morfydd Clark; Saint Maud, Crawl, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) tending to it like a child, than it does their son’s loss. The local folklore is about sacrifice, a long-cut tree, the rabbit, three sacrifices… what is to come? Folklore is realized as horrible legend, sanity is lost, people are cursed.
Director Daniel Kokotajlo’s film is pretty much an intriguing slow burn… and I’m not even sure what this movie is meant to be or mean other than a bizarre story of parental grief. Still, it’s a somewhat interesting watch, well-acted, well produced, and very weird.