Director – Daina Reid, Screenplay – Hannah Kent, Producers – Anna McLeish & Sarah Shaw, Photography – Bonnie Elliott, Music – Mark Bradshaw & Marcus Whale, Visual Effects – Chroma Media, Concrete Wednesday Post Production & UnityFX, Special Effects – One Take Wonders Australia (Supervisor – John Sanderson), Production Design – Vanessa Cerne. Production Company – Screen Australia/South Australia Film Corporation/Carver Films.
Cast
Sarah Snook (Dr Sarah Gregory), Lily LaTorre (Mia), Damon Herriman (Pete), Greta Scacchi (Joan)
Plot
Sarah Gregory is a paediatrician, divorced and raising her seven year-old daughter Mia on her own. All of a sudden, Mia’s behaviour begins to change and she takes to wearing a cardboard cut-out mask of a rabbit. She then insists that her name is Alice, the name of Sarah’s younger sister who ran away at the age of seven and was never found. This takes Sarah on a journey into her past that uncovers what happened to Alice.
The headline name that Run Rabbit Run boasts is Sarah Snook, an actress I have been championing way back since works like These Final Hours (2013) and in particular her amazing performance in Predestination (2014). Of recent, Snook has gained high international presence in tv’s Succession (2018-23). Run Rabbit Run was a feature-length directorial for Daina Reid, who worked as an actress throughout the 1990s/2000s and since the 2000s has been a regular director in Australian and occasionally US tv.
My initial assumption when I first saw the title come up Run Rabbit Run was that we were in for an adaptation of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), an evisceration of middle-class anomie and married life that has gained the status of an American literary classic. (This has also been filmed as Rabbit, Run (1970) starring James Caan). However, this does not turn out to be the case.
We have a set-up that is commonplace for the horror film in which mother Sarah Snook finds that her daughter (Lily LaTorre)’s behaviour has changed and then that she is claiming to be the sister that went mysteriously missing when Sarah was a child. All of this seems a standard set-up for a Ghost Story or perhaps even more so a Possession story.
Sarah Snook searches for ghosts of the past
On the other hand, viewed as a horror film – that’s one of the labels it is listed under on Netflix – Run Rabbit Run is awfully avoidant of the genre. It is a slow burn film – it takes over half the running time before you get an easy handle on what it is about, for instance. I am cautious about calling it a possession film as the term comes with many loaded associations – the possesse in cracked face mouthing obscenities, levitations and manifestations, a cadre of priests come in to chant the rites of exorcism and so on. Here all we get is Lily LaTorre acting stroppy and insisting that her name is Alice and that the old family home is her real home.
Certainly, you have to commend Daina Reid. She produces impeccable atmosphere, the sort that many other horror directors merely strain for. The main complaint about this is that the lighting level is so dark and murky that it is often impossible to see what is happening in a scene. The drawback to this is that the film is all mood without any visceral payoff in terms of spooky moments or jumps. The nearest we get is a nasty scene where Sarah Snook accidentally slams a car door on Lily LaTorre’s hand. The eventual denouement is one of mundane confrontations with secrets of the past.
