dev patel

Rabbit Trap (2025)

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“Listen,” speak-sings Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) into her microphone over ambient nature sounds that she and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) have been recording. “Noise … the oldest of gods. Before language, before flesh, before name, she was here.” It’s 1976, and the two of them have moved from London to the Welsh countryside with reel to reel recorders and state of the art microphones, which they traipse around the forest with, capturing the sounds of squelching marshes, nightbirds chirping as they move through the air in bloblike flocks, skittering feet of bugs across leaves, and the distant song of unseen fauna, or at least one hopes it’s something so natural. Later, the couple meets a mysterious androgynous child (actress Jade Croot, although The Child is only ever referred to as “he”), and when the boy asks if he can sing Daphne a lullaby that his mother used to sing him as a child, she records him as well. Listening back to it later, Darcy says it “sounds like a spell.” Rabbit Trap traffics in this idea, of sound as song, noise as god, voice as spellcraft, in a beautiful little folk horror from director Bryn Chainey, who has heretofore mostly worked in short film. 

There are points of comparison that it would be easy to go to when describing the film’s atmosphere. The sudden presence of a creepy child who brings with him portents of folkloric truth calls The Killing of a Sacred Deer to mind, and although this is set in Wales rather than on the Cornish coast, the atmosphere of isolation, hallucination, and lost time invokes Enys Men. There’s a sequence in which The Child leads Daphne to a series of tunnels and trenches that seem neither manmade nor natural and lures her through them by whistling a tune that she whistles back to him, and for a moment I felt I was watching Jessie Buckley harmonize with her own echo in Men. Despite these intentional homages or simple similarities, Rabbit Trap feels fresh despite being familiar. Even the way that this film goes to horror media’s most frequently visited well of late (grief and trauma are the real monsters) doesn’t feel like the cliché that it is. For one thing, the film never feels the need to dwell on what’s causing Darcy’s sleep paralysis. We see him experiencing strange dreams of the windows of the house being covered in goop and a spectral figure that may represent his father, with Daphne being quick to record his sleeptalking in the hopes that it might help him remember something when he wakes. Later, those dreams recur after he has broken a fairy circle, and in the end of the film, we find him standing in a beautiful vista recording his truth so that he can play it for Daphne later, since it’s too hard for him to say to her face. We can really only speculate what it is that’s caused Darcy to see himself as the source of an emotional “rot,” because it’s important only in its implications, not in its specifics. 

The plot kicks off when Darcy accidentally wanders into a ring of mushrooms, which folklore calls a “fairy ring,” and to break one invites the wrath of the Tylwyth Teg, fae from another world. Shortly thereafter, The Child appears outside of their cabin. Playing off Darcy’s concerns that he might be a burglar, he instead calls himself a hunter, taking Darcy to see the traps that he lays out for rabbits, taking special care to note that the bait has to be offered with honest and meaningful intention in order for the trap to work. The Child grows closer to both of them, taking an active interest in Daphne’s previous musical work (he asks if she’s famous, to which Darcy replies “You can’t really be famous with her kind of music. She’s more… influential”) and enjoying his and Darcy’s excursions into the marshes to record nature noise. As he becomes more and more of a surrogate child to the couple, his affection for Daphne grows to the point that he asks her to pretend to be his mother, as he claims his died long ago. Darcy, with his unspoken and only vaguely defined issues surrounding fatherhood, starts to get a little creeped out by this, and The Child’s behavior becomes more invasive and presumptuous. What little we do know about Darcy’s past is revealed to us not explicitly but in the way that he talks about sound—that god, that ghost, calling it a “Vibration of an event, an energy shadow, memory carved into the air, a scared lost creature desperate for somewhere to hide before it fades away. When you hear a sound,” he says, “you become its home, and your body is the house it haunts.” Darcy’s body is keeping an unknown score, and The Child has come to find a new family, one way or another. 

Much is left up to interpretation here. My personal reading is that the story The Child tells early in the story, about a baby brother that wandered into the Tylwyth Teg circle and disappeared, is actually about him, and that he grew up parentless in the fae realm, or that he was otherwise a kind of inverse changeling. Now that the ring has been disturbed again, he has the opportunity to go back out into our world and try to reestablish some kind of family, which would explain his quiet (and later loud) desperation on this front. This would also make his introduction of himself as a “hunter,” rather than the more accurate descriptor of “trapper,” a bit of foreshadowing despite the metaphorical, psychedelic rabbit trap that Daphne and Darcy must pass through at the end. Of course, this is a film that leaves a great deal up to your imagination, one that is more a visual and sonic experience than it is a narrative one. Its brisk runtime, coming in at under 90 minutes, means that this tone over text ethos never wears out its welcome. It’s unlikely that, at this late date, many people are still considering new entries onto their end of the year lists, and although this one was stellar, it’s one that will be waiting for you when you’re ready for it, but it’s an inexpensive rental if you’re still doing your 2025 end of the year cramming. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Monkey Man (2024)

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The story of how Monkey Man came to be seen by anyone is a narrative about power, capital, and the cowardice of corporations that underscores the themes of the film in a metatextual way. Initially intended to be released on Netflix, that organization was planning to shelve the film, as its straightforward criticism of Hindu nationalism in India, which is gaining power in a time of rising fascism globally, was considered inappropriate while Netflix is courting international expansion into the subcontinent. The film was seen by Jordan Peele, who flexed his not-inconsiderable muscle to get Monkey Man released theatrically stateside, and it’s now available for digital purchase as well. The film itself—directed by, produced by, and starring Dev Patel—follows a fairly straightforward narrative of revenge, but one which is wrapped up in political and state violence and the corruption of faith by seekers of power.

As a child, our protagonist, who is given no name other than “Kid,” lived in a village that was razed to the ground by corrupt police officer—redundant, I know—Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher), under the direction of Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). Shakti is a widely respected faith leader whose apparent religious devotion is a cover for his ever-expanding empire of factories, which he claims to the press are simply “communes,” and the destruction of Kid’s home is merely one in a long line of such actions, where the survivors are either forced to flee or become little more than chattel slaves in the factories that are built over the land they once called home. Like most murderous and fanatical entities, like (for instance) the Zionist terrorist state, they arrive with “records” that indicate these sites “historically” belong to someone else, and that the land is being “returned,” and in so doing rape, pillage, burn, and murder innocents while pretending that they are offering them the opportunity to flee. Now an adult, Kid scrapes by in an underground kickboxing ring as Monkey Man, the monkey-masked “heel” who puts on a good show before taking the fall against “face” characters like King Cobra, Shere Khan, and Baloo the Bear. The monkey mask means something different to him, however, as it represents his connection to Hanuman, a Hindu deity who was the subject of his mother’s devotion. The film opens as he prepares for his roaring rampage of revenge, setting up the theft of the handbag of Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar), the foul-mouthed owner-operator of a luxury brothel called Kings, then returning it to her with a sufficiently believable cover story and rejecting her offer of a cash reward in exchange for a job.

From there, he ingratiates himself to Queenie’s henchman Alphonso (Pitobash) by giving him inside information about the kickboxing matches, and he works his way up to a penthouse party that Singh is attending. He manages to almost complete his assassination of the man, but his impulsive need to deliver an action hero one liner to Singh, “Blessings from my mother,” allows an opening for the officer to get the upper hand. A wounded Kid flees and falls into a polluted river, where he would have died were he not rescued by a group of hijra, a community of transgender, intersex, or eunuch people who live communally (and in some nations in South Asia are recognized officially and legally as a third gender). Earlier in the film, during a broadcast that Kid watches after taking another dive in the ring, the TV cuts from a journalist’s softball interview with Shakti to coverage of anti-trans violence at the hands of right-wing agitators, although, as with media in the west, their failure to make a connection between the two stories is a deliberate obfuscation of that connection. Alpha (Vipin Sharma), the guru of the hijra community, nurses Kid back to health, and the community at large helps renew his vigor as he approaches another opportunity to take down both Singh and Shakti.

Taken at nothing more than face value, this is a fun action movie, where the choreography of the fighting is absolutely stellar. The film references its most overt influence, John Wick, on its sleeve by mentioning the film by name, but Patel has cited Korean action flicks Ajeossi (aka The Man from Nowhere) and I Saw the Devil as well. I haven’t seen the former, and, unfortunately, it’s been so long since I saw the latter that my memory isn’t clear enough to pull out specific influences. The action here is stunning, with long sequences that remain exciting through a combination of dynamic camera work, novel shot choices, exciting locations, and the kind of frenetic energy that feels like speeding. There’s a bathroom brawl that’s the equal of, if not better than, the one in M.I.: Fallout, and the sequence there is a franchise highlight. A flight from police on foot and then via electric rickshaw (complete with a Fast & Furious style NOS-injector) is a ton of fun, and the final assault on Kings owes a lot to The Raid—that certainly wasn’t the first film to have our protagonist(s) take out a building floor by floor as they approached their boss battle, but it arguably perfected it. This comes off not as a compilation or recitation of hits, but as something exciting and worthwhile in and of itself, and even if that’s all that one takes from it, this is still a great action movie.

I appreciate the depth of this one, though, and I especially love the way that the hijra are treated with respect and dignity, and that they get to fulfill an important narrative role in the story not just as the community that nursed the hero back to health and was saved by him in the end, but that they get to be the cavalry that backs him up when all seems lost. Queerness in India isn’t something that I have a scholarly knowledge of, obviously, but I have been privy to anecdotes, and I think that there is something in the nature of fascism that tells on itself in the discrepancy between the homophobias here and abroad. In the U.S. and the larger West, the supremacy of fundamentalist Christian politics plays a key role in instilling, inscribing, and disguising bigotry in the hearts and minds of the populace — that is, being queer is wrong because (their reading of) their scripture says so. In India, even though the population is predominantly Hindu and fundamentalist Hindu politics are a key role in that nation’s contemporary authoritarianism, Hinduism and the texts thereof are full of queer deities and heroes that are absent from the canonized Old and New Testaments. Fire god Agni had a husband and a wife and there are tales that explicitly reference him having sexual encounters with men; Ardhanarishvara (whose temple is attended by Alpha and the other hijra in the film) is a split-down-the-middle merging of Shiva and his consort Parvati; and many others characters like Shikhandi and Arjuna are transformed between sex and gender. There’s no “scriptural basis” (as we would call it in the West) for the homophobia and transphobia of the rising right wing where Monkey Man takes place, but it still happens because those bigotries are inherent to fascism, not to faith. You’re not going to see a movie made in the West where a group of transwomen get to be the cavalry that rescues the hero outside of the occasional shoestring-budgeted envelope pusher, but you can see it here, and that’s lovely.

The only thing that really doesn’t fit here is the presence of the love interest, Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala). There’s a reason that we’ve gotten this far without mentioning her. Sita is one of the sex workers employed at Kings, and the fact that she seems to be Singh’s favorite is made known does little to affect motivation or characterization — with Kid already seeking to kill Singh for assaulting and murdering his mother, there’s no real need to give him additional reasons to want the man dead, and in fact muddles things a little. Her major contribution to the film is that she’s the one who takes out Queenie so that we don’t have to see our hero shoot a woman, and that means she’s more plot point than character. Other than that, however, this is just about a perfect action film, and one with a lot going on under the surface, which it draws attention to through its continuous motif of roots; Kid’s mother shows him the roots of the trees in and around their village and teaches him about their spiritual significance; the people who are threatened with being forcibly relocated, including Kid’s community and the hijra are implicitly and explicitly being uprooted, and the temple in which Alpha and their people live is one with roots that run deeper than a man is tall. As a text and an action film, this one is definitely rewarding and worth seeking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Green Knight (2021)

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It’s Christmas in July! Or at least it was last weekend when I saw David Lowery’s latest, long-delayed, gorgeous bombast, The Green Knight. There have been multiple failed attempts at bringing Arthurian stories to the big screen in a meaningful way in my lifetime (although that 2004’s King Arthur, 2006’s Tristan and Isolde, and 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword all have exactly 31% on Rotten Tomatoes is impressive in its own strange way), with the most successful being the generally disappointing First Knight, which no one remembers. Fun fact: Ralph Ineson, who plays the titular pastoral paladin in this film, was in First Knight. Sorry to get into the trivia portion of this review so early, but I don’t really have a lot to say about this one. Shocking coming from an overtalker like myself, I know, but sometimes there are films that you don’t see so much as experience, and like Lowery’s A Ghost Story before it, The Green Knight is one such film. 

Which isn’t to say that there’s not a clear narrative here. There is, and it’s fairly easy to follow. Gawain (Dev Patel) is the nephew of King Arthur (Sean Harris) by way of his sister (Sarita Choudhury), who is traditionally Morgause but appears to be a combination of Morgause and Morgaine le Fay (also usually—but not always—Arthur’s step- or half-sister). On Christmas morning, he awakens beside his lover, the commoner Essel (Alicia Vikander) and makes his way back to the castle, where he washes up before appearing before Arthur, his queen (Kate Dickie), and the other knights of the realm. The elderly Arthur invites Gawain to sit beside him and tell him a story of himself, so that he may know his potential heir better, but the younger man admits that he has no great deeds of himself to share. “Yet,” Guinevere corrects him, “you have no stories to tell yet.” Elsewhere, Morgause/Morgaine and a few attendants perform a ceremony that appears to invoke or invite a large, green knight (Ineson, as noted) to appear in the great hall, riding a massive steed. He issues a challenge, asking only that one of Arthur’s fabled knights strike him a blow with the caveat that the following year Arthur’s champion goes to the “green chapel” and allow the knight to return the blow in kind. All refuse, and Merlin (Emmet O’Brien) shakes his head slightly when Arthur himself seems prepared to face the challenge. Gawain asks that he be allowed to do so, and is given Arthur’s own sword to face the knight. When the Green Knight offers his neck to the boy, he first laughs, then grows angry at the visitor for mocking him before lopping off the larger man’s head. Undeterred, the knight’s body retrieves his head, laughs, and says he’ll see Gawain the next Christmas. 

After a “too short year,” Gawain sets out on his journey to find the Green Chapel and the knight therein, with gifts like a shield which bears an image of the Virgin Mary and is anointed by a bishop and a green sash that his mother makes, and into which she inserts sigils. After departing Camelot, he first passes some older towers and buildings in decline, then through a section of deforested woods which are in the process of being cut down, and finally comes upon a field in which a battle has been fought and in which a few fires yet smolder. There he encounters a scavenger (Barry Keoghan) who points him in the right direction, but after he gives the poorer man a single coin, and even then only because he was guilted, Gawain finds himself the victim of two of the poor man’s fellow highwaymen. Now divested of his shield, horse, belt, and even the Green Knight’s axe, Gawain eventually frees himself, but is weakened. Eventually making his way to a seemingly deserted house, Gawain avails himself of the empty bed therein, only to be awoken in the night by the spirit of a woman named Winifred, who asks him to reunite her decapitated head with the rest of her body, which he does; once this task is complete, the Green Knight’s axe is mysteriously returned to him. He ventures further, facing starvation and madness, eventually meeting and becoming the traveling companion of a fox, and even encountering a group of mysterious giants as they wander in an apparent migratory pattern (this was my favorite part). 

Eventually, he comes to a castle occupied by a friendly noble lord (Joel Edgerton), his wife (Vikander again), and an unnamed, unremarked-upon sightless woman (Helena Browne). As in the poem, the Lord enters into an agreement with Gawain that would mean that anything given to Gawain in the Lord’s house would be given by Gawain in turn, and the Lady of the house tempts Gawain’s virtue. On his final day within the castle, the Lady returns Gawain’s green sash to him, claiming that she made it herself, and reiterating that it will keep him from harm; he accepts it, but not before finally giving in to her advances (albeit in more of a shortstop way, in that it’s between second and third base). Leaving the house, he encounters the Lord for the last time, but does not give him the sash (or the hand job) as their deal would require. Gawain reunites with the fox, who accompanies him all the way to a stream where a boat waits to take him to the Green Chapel, and the fox suddenly speaks, to give him one more warning to turn back and avoid his fate, but Gawain soldiers on. 

At long last, he meets the Knight, and after he flinches, the Green Knight teases him, and then Gawain flees. He returns to the place where the boat was left and finds his horse returned. He makes his way back to Camelot, where he is reunited with Essel (in the Biblical sense), knighted by a bedridden Arthur, and eventually becomes king. Essel gives birth to a son that Gawain takes to raise, leaving behind a few shekels on her bloody birthing bed; as time goes on, Camelot begins to degrade, perhaps because of her dishonored king, or simply because it is in the nature of “Camelot” to wane when Arthur is gone. Gawain marries a lady of proper aristocratic birth and she bears him a daughter, while his son dies in a battle in which Gawain himself does not participate. In all these moments, which play out with no dialogue, the sash is never removed. He becomes a pariah in his own kingdom, lacking the respect that the middling folk who adored his uncle. He finally faces his end as Camelot prepares to fall to marauders, and as he finds himself seated alone on the throne he does not deserve, he removes the sash at last, and his head falls to the ground … and then we return to the Green Chapel, and the realization that all of these moments are, to paraphrase Dickens, the shadows of things that May Be, not necessarily which Will Be. Realizing that he cannot flee from fulfilling his debt of honor, he once more submits to the Green Knight, who playfully traces his finger along the royal nephew’s throat. Credits!

That’s more of a summary than a review, but it was an exercise for myself as much as it is a recommendation for you, dear reader. When I walked out of the theater with my friends, none of us was completely certain what to make of it. When recording our recent Lagniappe episode about Stoker, Brandon referred to Nicole Kidman’s third act “I can’t wait to see the world break you down” speech as a “barn burner,” and this film has a monologue of the same caliber delivered with delicious righteousness by Vikander as the Lady; although, an equally apt comparison would be to call her speech this film’s version of “Rooney Mara eats a pie for 5 minutes,” as she describes all of the potentialities of what the color green could mean—nature, entropy, life, death, rebirth, sickness—in a way that becomes completely hypnotic. Is it “good”? I’m not sure, but it sure was huge. It’s so soporific that I’m not completely certain it even manages to tie into the film’s larger themes, but I certainly experienced something. 

This is a story about honor, and from whence it flows and how one can come to be anointed by it. Gawain, as a member of the aristocracy, fails to consider the small folk, which is traditionally the province in which Arthur succeeds, and from which his honor (and thus his power) flows. From the moment he first appears on screen, his casual disregard for those outside of the landed aristocracy is made apparent, as he ignores the burning of a commoner’s hut as he wends his way back to the castle proper. When he is followed into the plains by children who are entranced by the fledgling, yet-unbuilt legend of Gawain, he spares not a smile or a wave for them. When he meets the scavenger, he must be guilted into giving him a pittance, even though, as heir apparent to the king and a queen who has passed her child-bearing years, his funds are virtually limitless, and the man’s pitiable existence is explicitly the result of being a resident of the medieval equivalent of fly-over country during a skirmish fought in the name of kings he will never see or know. When asked by Winnifred to retrieve her head, he asks what his reward will be, and she’s shocked by his lack of chivalric benevolence. He even fails to uphold his end of the bargain he makes with the Lord in whose house he finds healing and comfort. 

Still, there is a seed of honor in Gawain which, if properly nurtured, could yet germinate and grow within him, just as the Green Knight is composed of the branches and trees which also make up the Green Chapel. After all, what is honor? What is courage? These things are not conferred upon a person by a higher power, or by that power’s earthly representative sprinkling holy water on a shield. They are not conferred upon a person by the stature of their lineage or through gifts from a progenitor, despite that this was the method by which power was transferred for much of human politik. They are not conferred by drawing a sword from a stone, or from the hand of the one who previously did so, nor are they conferred by regal clothing; although these things may stem from that which resides within, they are the noble flowering, not the source of the vine. Gawain may only complete his quest out of fear of the shame of returning home without having made good his word, but therein lies the nature of all courageousness: if we act with honor, even if it be for spite or in avoidance of shame, the performance of the thing becomes the thing itself, be it for the better and green in growth or for the worse and green in rot. Despite many opportunities to turn back and persistent discouragement from his pursuit, Gawain presses on, even passing what could be called his last temptation. He sees his life as it could be, and once more chooses to press on, and in so doing, becomes more than he had been. 

Lowery has said that, in his vision, Gawain does not survive this encounter. Which, first of all, how dare he? But secondly, this is your semi–annual reminder that, as for me and my house, we will follow Roland Barthes, so I reject that interpretation and substitute my own. I feel that, textually, we are seeing Morgause/Morgaine test her son, as the Green Knight is clearly summoned or even created by her magics, and Gawain is told explicitly that the Knight is someone he knows. Our very first image is of Gawain on Arthur’s throne and bearing his crown before he is, unflinching, covered in flame, as if all that was weak and chaff within him has been burned away. To see this purification trial to its end, in order to prevent her unready and unworthy son from pulling a total Mordred and ascending to the throne and hastening Camelot’s decline, she creates this series of tests that not only prove his mettle but create it. It’s worth mentioning, in case it’s been a long time since your last literature class, that Morgaine is revealed to be the blind woman in the house of Sir Bertilak (the rough equivalent of the unnamed Lord in the film), and that she was pulling the strings of the entire narrative all along. 

I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed that there was little exploration of the relationship between Albionian pre-Christian paganism and the rise of Arthurian Christendom. (Did I already give away that Mists of Avalon is my favorite Arthurian story by insistently calling her “Morgaine” and not “Morgan”? A pox on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s grave, though.) The very concept of “England” is thoroughly tied into the rise of Christianity as an influence on politics and world events, and the application of those motifs to Arthurian legend, which is thoroughly and inexplicably tied to pre-Christian magic, makes for a truly fascinating, if muddled, historiography. The way that Gawain was first girded by both his mother’s smoke-and-incense dark magic sash and the Marian image on his shield seemed to be setting up a narrative in that vein, but if that element was carried through in any way, it’s that religion, as a creation of man, is doomed to be destroyed and reclaimed, as demonstrated by the scavengers breaking his shield almost immediately, and the way in which the foliage of the Green Chapel is superimposed over and suffused through a Christian house of worship. 

I don’t know if you’ll like this. I don’t know if I liked it. But I did experience it, and I would again. After all this time being isolated, and with the possibility that we’ll have to do this all again on the horizon, if you need to be transported, take this journey.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond