Sarah Snook's 'Run Rabbit Run' Moves at a Tortoise's Pace

By Lindsay Traves | Film | July 6, 2023 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | July 6, 2023 |

Motherhood, generations, grief, all common horror fodder used with varying success. More recently, fans clung to Relic, a haunting tale of aging, hereditary diseases, and motherhood. Falling closer in line with Z and The Babadook, there’s Run Rabbit Run, the newest fright for the Netflix audience.

Sarah Snook leads as Sarah, an OBGYN and single mother trying to make it work with her ex and his new wife and family, managing her past trauma and mental health issues, and the suddenly strange actions of her young daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre). Sarah, a no-nonsense-working-mom is kicked into high stress when her daughter starts to intermittently insist that she is Alice, Sarah’s sister who has been missing since they were kids. The otherwise fun-loving young girl (whom Sarah affectionately refers to as ‘“bunny”) suddenly dons a creepy paper rabbit mask, insisting she is Alice in a way that torments Sarah. Sarah slowly begins to unravel as she is challenged by her daughter’s increasingly antagonistic behavior, losing control of the pieces of her life she was working so hard to hold together.

Run Rabbit Run isn’t so different from its cohorts, but mostly in that it reached for and clutched some of the old tropes like creepy drawings, spooky kids, and a mother unraveling. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my recent reviews lamenting the derivative grief-focused horror movies while continuing to insist there’s room for everyone. Run Rabbit Run doesn’t fall behind by being a collection of clichés, but more that it takes the same old scenario and stretches it long and thin. It’s easy to compare it to The Babadook by virtue of it being an Australian horror movie about a creepy kid and a freaked-out mother, but they mostly share the common link of ambiguity about what the mother is truly experiencing. Run Rabbit Run has some creative cuts and hints that suggest different versions of reality and as Sarah unravels, her perspective becomes less reliable. Where this might have made for an interesting twist, the ambiguity feels trite and predictable, as if the narrative was more a rehash in the vein of its predecessors instead of something new.

Some of the horror elements are shocking and worth perking up for, but they come wrapped in long and drawn-out moments that don’t serve the narrative. It’s a slog, especially for a film with a title that suggests a rapid pace. Sarah’s job as an OBGYN seems important, as does the relationship to her recently passed father, and her estranged mother. But most of these function as hints into the lack of Sarah’s mental integrity as opposed to explored story beats to fill in narrative gaps or enrich the story. Instead, Sarah is often alone in periods of reflection, which doesn’t function well with a story this thin.

Hannah Kent wrote the script, and it was directed by Daina Reid who has a resume full of TV credits including The Handmaid’s Tale andThe Outsider. It seems to track how she’d use landscapes to set a tone and would be drawn to explore characters who experience ethical ambiguity and challenges to their own reality. Snook, of course, is a standout coming off of her beloved performance as Shiv Roy in Succession, delivering a performance that quite differs from that role but is still a balance of toggling between being warm and ice cold.

Run Rabbit Run is ultimately a predictable bore that seems to have scares mathematically placed into a runtime populated with unresolved cliché beats. The psychological horror is diluted by it’s runtime and inability to resist ambiguity in favor of a tired twist ending.

Run Rabbit Run is available on Netflix June 28, 2023