First-time director Daina Reid throws a rusty shed full of horror tropes against the wall in its Sundance Midnight premiere. A surprising number of them stick.
Fans of the "I love you, my son, but right now you're scaring mommy" subgenre are in store for a treat with Daina Reid's "Run Rabbit Run," which salutes, like a couple of other notables, a similarly themed song. Horrors, from Australia. Indeed, the top-hatted shadow of Jennifer Kent's "The Babadook" and the matrilineal mayhem of Natalia Erika James' "Relic," two other Australian women's debuts that premiered in Sundance's Midnight section, loom large here. , as have other breakouts like "Hereditary," "Goodnight Mommy" and even "The Orphanage." Too big, possibly, for Reid's film to fully escape a sense of diminished returns on her ideas that motherhood it's crazy, she protects or projects and pain is a ghost.
Director: Daina Reid
Writer: Hannah Kent
Stars: Sarah Snook, Damon Herriman, Greta Scacchi
However, what it lacks in thematic novelty, "Run Rabbit Run" makes up for in the sophistication of its moment-to-moment scarification and performances from Sarah Snook and outstanding newcomer Lily LaTorre, as mother and daughter respectively. Between them, Reid and screenwriter Hannah Kent conjure up a terrifying relationship that's made even creepier because we're never sure if it's fear or fear.
Snook stars as Sarah, a fertility doctor grieving the recent death of her beloved father, but keeping a bravely cheerful face for her daughter Mia ella (LaTorre), who is turning seven. Sarah is no longer with Mia's father, Pete (Damon Herriman, who doesn't play Charles Manson for a change), but on friendly terms with him and his new partner Denise (Naomi Rukavina). They are invited to Mia's birthday party. Purposely not invited is Sarah's mother, Joan (Greta Scacchi), who languishes with dementia in a nursing home.
The estrangement is no accident: Sarah deliberately dodges the increasingly insistent calls from her mother's caretakers and, unseen by Mia, saves Joan's birthday card for her granddaughter. Later that night, drinking wine alone on the breezy back porch, she burns it.
She has cut Joan out of Mia's life so successfully that she is unsettling when Mia suddenly claims that she "misses" the grandmother she never knew. When Sarah protests that that's not possible, the girl sighs, "I miss people I've never met all the time" with a world-weariness that relaxes, even amuses Sarah: it's just her precocious little girl being cute and weird. But it's less easy to dismiss the ensuing tantrums during which Mia insists they call her Alice, the name of Sarah's sister who disappeared... at age seven. And it's utterly impossible to get rid of the white rabbit that, to Mia's delight, appears on the doorstep of her modernist Melbourne home. When Sarah tries to drag it out of her makeshift garden enclosure one night, the creature bites her, creating the most obviously festering wound of the film's many unhealed wounds.
If Reid doesn't invent a lot of new horror scenarios, she certainly is assiduous about including as much existing iconography as possible. There's the crude rabbit mask that Mia insists on wearing. There are childhood photographs of scratched faces and a corrugated shed hung with tetanus-rusted knives and claw-shaped tools. There are an improbable number of doors that have a habit of opening slowly in the background, and many dreams in which something indescribable is about to reveal itself when the dreamer wakes with a start. Weeping wounds, recurring bruises, sudden nosebleeds, and inky black voids in which something, or perhaps nothing at all, lurks: "Run Rabbit Run" has them all.
Many of these elements, along with the "Alice in Wonderland" allusions of the sister's name and that pesky white rabbit, mean more than they actually offer. But Bonnie Elliott's sepulchral cinematography, especially the "Top of the Lake"-esque Aussie gothic landscapes later, makes each a carefully crafted exercise in camera placement, while Mark Bradshaw and Marcus' score Incredibly awkward and bass-laden, Whale preys on your nerves even when you know you're being cheated on.
But it's mainly the performances that ensure "Run Rabbit Run," which was picked up by Netflix before Sundance, is more than just a greatest-hits compilation of classic horror scares. Snook is playing so far against his "Succession" Shiv-type that it's not until late that we remember his great capacity for cunning.
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