When it comes to festival midnight films, sometimes it’s best to go in blind and with a lack of anticipation. Rabbit Trap, the directorial debut of Bryn

"Rabbit Trap," which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival, explores Welsh mythology so slowly that it fails to terrify.

There’s no microphone in the world strong enough to pick up a person’s deepest secrets, and yet every time Darcy (a compellingly anxious Dev Patel) takes his sound equipment for a wander around the primordial Welsh countryside,

Bryn Chainey’s first feature centers on an avant-garde musician and her sound recordist husband living in a remote cottage, where a strange local child forms an unhealthy attachment to them.

Debut feature filmmaker Bryn Chainey discusses fairies, goblins and Welsh folklore and casting a 'ripped' post-'Monkey Man' Dev Patel

Instead, the film starring Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen takes a shockingly steep dive into narrative tedium and ho-hum genre beats. What initially begins as a formally adventurous tale of a husband and wife trying to make sense of a sound they recorded in 1976 deep in the Welsh woods becomes a woefully meandering and mundane horror misfire that wastes its potential.

In writer-director Bryn Chaney's feature debut 'Rabbit Trap', he uses Celtic folklore and the intimacy of sound to unpack an inner darkness.