Under the auspices of a mystical rabbit’s foot, the fortunes of three men intertwine with fatal consequences. A pitch black comic fable set against the backdrop of the Old West.

Director’s Statement

The Rabbit’s Foot is an ironic love letter to the Spaghetti Western, a genre which concerns itself with the irreverent handling of archetypes. The genre takes recognisable characters and stock setups but then uses them to tell stories full of wit and surprise, often relying on the audience’s familiarity with the tropes it handles in order to effectively carry out its various sleights of hand. It is a fantasy of the purest kind: a foreign reproduction of old-school Americana which, by transposing the old cliches into a new context devoid of any moral component, takes on an absurd vitality of its own.

In making The Rabbit’s Foot, we sought to create a fable without a moral, a bedtime story for grown ups with a whiff of nihilism hanging about its nether regions, a picaresque in which the villain unceremoniously seizes centre stage. Tonally, it was our intention to lay the suspense and emotions on thick so that as the narrative proceeds, purposefully struggling to maintain a coherent trajectory, it serves only to fuel a building sense of ironic detachment which comes to pervade the screen.

The Rabbit’s Foot deliberately eschews any sense of empathy for its characters, instead aiming to imbue the story itself with an unhinged and schizophrenic quality: a narrative which gets lost in diversions driven by confusing and unexpected twists of fate, the implications of which (if there are seen to be any at all) are left for the viewer to speculate on.

More than anything though, we sought to create a piece that would entertain. It’s a film we were very serious about making, but which shouldn’t be taken very seriously. If people enjoy trying to untease what it all means, then that’s great. But if it can raise a smile, we’ll consider our job well done.