Run Rabbit Run Review

Director Daina Reid crafts an impressive atmosphere in Run Rabbit Run, the Australian horror-thriller now streaming on Netflix. Led by an impressive performance from Succession’s Sarah Snook, Run Rabbit Run even comes close to entering the canon of great “creepy kid” movies, but despite all its bells and whistles, the  structure of its screenplay works against itself at every turn. The result is a scattered and often repetitive film that wastes its central premise, which isn’t even fully revealed until about 10 minutes before the end.

After opening with a dreamlike sequence that has little symbolic bearing on the story, Run Rabbit Run paves the path for an unsettling domestic drama. As the blunt single mother Sarah (Snook) prepares for her lively daughter Mia’s (Lily LaTorre) seventh birthday party, a rabbit arrives at their doorstep at the same time as a birthday card from Sarah’s estranged mother, Joan. Sarah’s father has recently died, leaving a clutter of boxes for her to deal with and an emotional fog she can’t quite work through. This becomes all the more difficult when Mia, after insisting on keeping the rabbit, begins asking – and eventually, demanding – to visit Joan, despite never having met her or even being told her name.

Mia’s odd behavior begins to escalate, between claiming that she “misses” Joan, and knowing intimate details and tidbits about Sarah’s deeply private past –a past that is kept largely hidden from the audience until late into the film). Sarah instinctively blames this mysterious knowledge on Mia’s father – finger-pointing which, in an act of fairly solid construction by screenwriter Hannah Kent, has the added effect of Sarah being unable to ask him for help when her parenting struggles eventually mount –  and she also balks at the idea of seeking professional help for Mia, or for herself, when the situation grows more concerning. 

Most of the drama hinges on Snook’s striking performance, which becomes increasingly distraught as Mia wraps herself in her fantasies. Reid, in turn, crafts a number of subtleties throughout the movie’s first half:  frigid color correction, anticipation stoked by darkened negative spaces, the perfectly timed blowing of a white curtain the first time Mia jokingly mentions a ghost. The movie’s tensions continue to build, as Sarah discovers layer after layer to Mia’s seeming delusions. After a while, these setups largely lead to unsatisfying payoffs – if they’re paid off at all.

The structure of the screenplay works against itself at every turn

The key problem lies in the fact that the secrets of Sarah’s past are only secret to the audience. Every character in the film has significantly more information than we do, and the dramatic tension shared between Sarah and Mia – told through a mother’s concerned looks, as her daughter starts down an unconventional path – hinges on both characters knowing the full picture, or at least one of them trying to determine how much the other does or does not know. But given the opaqueness of the script, the audience is rarely allowed to empathize or connect with Sarah beyond the way she shuts Mia down every time the thorny subject is broached.  

Sarah’s prickliness is certainly engaging, but her less-than-stellar parenting ends up having no thematic ties to why she and her own mother are estranged (a dynamic seldom explored). After a while, what the film is even about becomes its own kind of mystery. Scenes quickly settle into a repetitive rhythm. Mia, after making outlandish claims, runs off as her mother gives chase, before something mildly spooky occurs – either in the corners of the frame, or entirely off screen – before the cycle begins again.

These frustrations compound when the movie can’t seem to decide how to best visualize Mia’s invocations of the past, or to whose perspective the story should be tethered. It switches gears abruptly from creepy kid movie, to ghost story, to tale of a woman gone mad, but without letting any one of these horror modes linger long enough to make emotional sense. As each of these plots unfold, they end up playing out like parallel stories suddenly smashed together, their literal and symbolic elements rarely working in tandem, in a mish-mash movie whose impact is constantly undercut by its own indecisiveness.