Run Rabbit Run, written by Hannah Kent and directed by Daina Reid, made its debut at Sundance Film Festival as part of the 2023 Midnight Selections program last evening. The Australian-set film puts a new shine on established tropes to create a story about family trauma in which past mistakes bubble to the surface.
Sarah Snook (Succession) plays a fertility specialist whose daughter Mia begins acting strangely on her seventh birthday. Despite her best efforts to pretend that everything is normal, her life begins to unravel as the girl, deftly played by Lily LaTorre, begins to insist that her name is Alice. That might not be so odd except that Alice is the name of her mother’s sister who disappeared when she was also seven.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, it’s because we’ve all seen this play out before, and once it is established, horror audiences will no doubt begin to suspect that the child is either possessed or reincarnated. I won’t tell you which one, of course, mostly because I don’t like to spoil films for new audiences, but also because Reid and Kent walk a fine ambiguous line throughout the film to keep their audience guessing.
Are they successful?
Well…
Kent is a well-known award-winning author with three titles–Burial Rites, The Good People, and Devotion–to her name. She is obviously a storyteller, but in Run Rabbit Run, her first screenplay, she leans just a little too heavily into the territory previously examined by films like Audrey Rose, Incident in the Ghostland, and Daniel Isn’t Real.
This doesn’t make the film bad. It’s actually quite good. Horror tropes become tropes because they work. Unfortunately, by leaning into them so heavily, it also becomes predictable. One seeming throwaway line from LaTorre gave away the entire “twist” and the impetus of Sarah’s trauma. Once that was revealed, I knew what story they were telling, even if I didn’t know how they would tell it.
Still, Reid manages to bring together a tense film, carried almost entirely by the mother-daughter relationship and the talent of the actors who took on the roles.
Snook infuses worry, fatigue, and fear into every expression as a mother on the edge of, well, becoming Essie Davis in The Babadook to which the film and the performance will no-doubt draw comparisons. Snook, however, is much more contained, in control, at the beginning of her arc. She has a journey to make which makes her later actions seem all the more brutal and sad.
As for LaTorre, she gives a sympathetic performance that is surprising for someone so young. She commits to her assertions, and her truth. Her tantrums never feel stylized or fake. She is a raw, vulnerable nerve in human form and if she continues in the profession, I’ve no doubt we’ll see even greater performances from her in the future.
These performances ultimately save Run Rabbit Run, and I’ve no doubt they played heavily into the fact that Netflix stepped in to grab up streaming rights to the film.
If you enjoy any of the films mentioned in this review, the film is definitely worth checking out. Keep your eyes peeled for Run Rabbit Run on Netflix!