In the Welsh folk-horror “Rabbit Trap,” debuting director Bryn Chainey creates an disquieting acoustic atmosphere and guides his trio of actors to powerful performances. However, these flourishes serve a muddled piece that coasts on its interpretability alone.

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.

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,

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.