RUN RABBIT RUN - Mark Reviews Movies

Run Rabbit Run, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 27, 2023

At the core of Run Rabbit Run is the mystery of what happened to its main character. Instead of thoughtfully examining or directly exploring the effects of that, Hannah Kent's screenplay becomes a lengthy stretch of obfuscation and a string of red herrings. That the movie's muddying amounts to cheap horror clichés feels disingenuous. That the pieces of misdirection are potential childhood traumas comes across as distasteful.

More to the point, though, director Daina Reid's psychological thriller, in which the psychology of a woman suffering from some form of trauma is presented as an imagined or real ghost story, just spins in circles until it finally reveals what is actually happening to its main character. The revelation doesn't arrive until late in the third act, so we can sense the filmmakers' dizziness while trying to keep this material from collapsing under its weak structure.

The woman at the heart of the tale is Sarah (Sarah Snook), a divorced mother to young Mia (Lily LaTorre). Life seems relatively normal for the two, as Sarah prepares for a birthday dinner for her daughter, while also going through the usual routine of taking Mia to school and working what seems to be a fairly flexible job as a fertility doctor (There's one scene establishing her career, and after that, she takes a lot of personal days, apparently, in order to deal with all of the screenplay's enigmatic goings-on).

The birthday dinner doesn't go too well. First, there's some tension with Sarah's ex-husband, Mia's father, Pete (Damon Herriman), who has a new wife (played by Naomi Rukavina), stepson, and a plan to have a child with his second spouse. Sarah is taken aback or offended or horrified at the notion, because she and Pete had agreed Mia would be an only child. There's also the strange appearance of a rabbit on Sarah's porch, and her daughter wants to keep it as a pet, which allows the movie to have one its multiple vaguely defined metaphors always on hand, too.

Oh, there's also the small matter that this is Mia's first birthday without her maternal grandfather, whose things are kept in boxes being stored out-of-sight-and-mind in Sarah's garage. Meanwhile, Sarah's estranged mother Joan (Greta Sacchi) is in a nursing home, being cared for on account of signs of dementia. For reasons neither Sarah nor the girl can explain (not to mention the screenplay, because to do so would be to demolish one bit of misdirection and give away parts of at least two attempted twists), Mia becomes obsessed with visiting her grandmother. Sarah doesn't want that, lest some terrible secret come to light.

At this point, it's basically impossible to explain what is or isn't happening in this story without giving away too much of Kent's unfortunately arranged game. That's partly because the movie only offers suggestions of potential traumatic events in Sarah's past, which the woman vaguely speaks of in quiet and harsh tones over the phone with Pete and his new wife—fearing one of them might have let something slip to Mia. The signs, though, are made fairly plain, such as the possibility that Sarah's mother was physically abusive or that her father was—sexually so, potentially.

Whether either of these is the case or a different possible trauma is the cause of Sarah's gradual breakdown over the course of the movie won't be disclosed here. The fact that the movie essentially toys with such pain as a means of generating mystery, though, only reveals how little Kent and Reid care about Sarah's trauma as anything other than a puzzle to be solved.

Well, they also care about it as a way of creating a broadly sinister atmosphere and some cheap scare tactics. We get visions of what may or may not be as memories emerge or Sarah's hold on reality begins to fail her, and despite the generic nature and inherent contrivance of the character's breakdown, Snook is emotionally convincing enough in the role for at least the performance side of the character to feel somewhat authentic. Otherwise, the rest of the eeriness comes from non-specifically ominous drawings and Mia behaving as a creepy kid, insulting her mother and stating that she isn't herself, but another person from the past who might have known about or been the foundation of Sarah's terrible secret.

One could make the argument that Run Rabbit Run hides as much as it does for so long as a way to reflect the main character's own state of mind—being unwilling and/or unable to confront her trauma. Considering how much the movie keeps from and how many ways it misleads us, though, that's a stretch, while the story's final note only affirms the whole thing has been a manipulative, deceptive game.

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