In Run Rabbit Run, Sarah feels disturbed when her daughter starts identifying herself as someone from Sarah’s past. The movie is now streaming on Netflix.
Story
Sarah, a fertility doctor, starts noticing a change in the behavior of her daughter, Mia, on Mia’s seventh birthday. To top that, a mysterious rabbit walks into their house. While Mia grows attached to the rabbit the moment she meets it, Sarah is uncomfortable having it around.
Mia sees her mother’s attempt to throw the rabbit out of the house. A crack develops in their bond, and her daughter starts acting strange.
Mia feels locked inside a room, longs for her grandmother, Joan, and gets nosebleeds from time to time. Sarah’s fears grow when Mia comes across the picture of Sarah’s sister, Alice, and starts identifying herself as Alice, claiming that she has come back to life.
Performances
Sarah Snook shines as Sarah, a protective mother who can go to great lengths for her child. One can notice how much she feels hurt when she is rejected as a mother by Lily LaTorre’s Mia.
Lily LaTorre, on the other hand, as Mia, will make the viewers hate her character. She comes out as an annoying daughter who won’t listen to her mother. She convinces the viewers that she is a completely different person from another life once the movie’s main conflict starts. Furthermore, she has a voice that is hardly tolerable.
Positives
Run Rabbit Run starts off great with a windy atmosphere that hints at the arrival of something ominous and supernatural. This atmosphere sticks around for the first half of the film.
The second half of the film takes place in a house in the middle of a desert. The emptiness of the place and the history it can have is enough to evoke fear in the viewers.
Run Rabbit Run, from time to time, makes great use of background music and camera techniques that are quite spooky in nature and synonymous with the horror genre. They may have become redundant for some, but they go well with the kind of tone that is set for the film.
Negatives
The film tries to meddle with the viewers’ minds and makes them debate whether there is something supernatural or not or if it is just the characters’ brains playing against them. The film fails in both places.
It takes too much time playing with these aspects, and they are backed by overused scare tactics and motifs that don’t actually leave a viewer wondering about what’s to come. Especially the scene where Sarah’s sister appears in the shadows is very generic and looks lame.
It feels like the film purposefully chooses a dull narrative to tell its story, which works for the genre of horror at times, but Run Rabbit Run is filled with a lot of horror tropes, and it’s hard to pinpoint what makes Run Rabbit Run different from stories like these.
Furthermore, the film also attempts to confuse the viewers by having two characters switch places time and time again. The viewers here are not left in awe after this; they are left more confused and frustrated.
Verdict
Run Rabbit Run fails to find its footing in both the psychological and horror genres. Its slow narrative and unwillingness to disclose a lot backfired on the film, as it produced something dull. Only Sarah Snook’s performance is a saving grace for the film.
Run Rabbit Run
Director: Daina Reid
Date Created: 2023-06-28 12:30
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Also Read: Run Rabbit Run summary and ending explained