Close your eyes. Imagine, if you will, a horror film about childhood trauma manifesting itself in adulthood. What do you see? Do you see the adult sufferer struggling to reckon her past with her relationship to her own child? Maybe you see the child behaving strangely, but the father (the parents are divorced, naturally) dismisses the behavior. There are lingering shots of dark spaces with violins slowly swelling in the background—“ominous music,” as the subtitles might label it. There’s a dementia diagnosis, since everyone’s afraid of getting old and losing their minds; there are disturbing drawings that the child has been making in class, prompting the teacher to suggest therapy; and there’s an as yet unexplained traumatic event that is obvious from the very beginning, so that the bread crumb trail laid out for the audience is less vaguely illuminating and more obvious as the red herring it is. And there are no real scenes of terror beyond the most predictable jump scares, leading one to wonder in what way the film constitutes horror beyond the most boilerplate trappings. Maybe this film in your head feels like a drama with Halloween decorations. Open your eyes—it’s possible that you had managed to describe the Run Rabbit Run.
The sophomore feature of Australian director Daina Reid, whose past work has included mostly television (episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Young Rock), Run Rabbit Run is an intriguing concept on paper: The past comes back with a vengeance against a young mother in the form of her daughter’s possession by her deceased sister. But Run Rabbit Run never gets past the sensation of being a Mad Libs horror movie, where those blank spaces are filled in with the most obvious tropes.
Sarah (Sarah Snook) is a young single mother and obstetrician, still mourning the recent death of her father on the day of her daughter Mia’s (Lily LaTorre) seventh birthday. Sarah is divorced from Mia’s father, Pete (Damon Herriman), who remarried a woman named Denise (Naomi Rukavina), who has a young son of her own who plays a bit too rough. Sarah and Pete seem to otherwise have a harmonious co-parenting relationship, and Mia seems like a loving young girl, referred to affectionately as “Bunny” by Sarah. It is a little more than mere coincidence that when Sarah and Mia arrive home after school, there’s a white, domesticated rabbit waiting patiently for them on their doorstep, whose appearance adds a wrinkle to the small birthday party planned between Sarah, Mia, and Pete’s new family. As a disgruntled Sarah tries to quietly ditch the rabbit that evening, it imparts upon her a nasty bite. Mia appears to witness the incident from the balcony above.
After the rabbit episode, Mia changes from happy and affectionate to distant and cryptic. She dons an unsettling, DIY rabbit mask to mimic her strange new pet, disavows Sarah as her mother and requests to be called by another name: “Alice.” She begins insisting that she visit Joan (Greta Scacchi), Sarah’s estranged, elderly mother whom Mia has never even met, and who now requires additional facility care due to her worsening dementia. On a first visit at the care facility, Joan immediately embraces Mia and appears to recognize her as this “Alice” who Mia believes herself to be, who we eventually learn was Sarah’s sister who went “missing” as a child. “I don’t think I am myself,” Mia calmly tells Sarah one day at the beach. Slowly but surely, the enigma of Sarah’s barely spoken past demands articulation, as we follow along the hazy half-explanations and experimental dreams. What’s the rub? Past life reincarnation? Possession? Or is it the guilt of a childhood mishap gone horribly awry becoming all too real?
There is little room for nuance in Run Rabbit Run, despite it ending on an almost insultingly ambiguous ending. Of course it ends on an ambiguous note, as if recompense for a narrative which offers very little else to chew on. The characters are not much more than the tropes that define them: Sarah, the traumatized mother with a secret; Mia, the stock creepy child acting out and tormenting her mother; Pete, the dismissive if well-meaning husband; Joan, the terrifyingly demented old woman. Viewers will likely draw comparisons between this film and another Australian horror film, with a similar child-parent dynamic and paper-thin trauma narrative, The Babadook, which at least managed to be appropriately unnerving. The horror movies that followed in its wake, though, have been far more grating, far more obvious, and far more condescending.
It’s a shame that movies like Run Rabbit Run, very much playing off the success of films like The Babadook, can’t seem to do much else with the concept beyond halfheartedly repackaging the familiar. It would be slightly more forgivable if Run Rabbit Run looked more decent or formally daring—some compositions, shot by cinematographer Bonnie Elliott, are at least striking in their placement of light and shadow. Otherwise, the colors are uninspired, stuck in various shades of muddy gray and sandy brown and merely mirroring the neutral tones of Australia’s desert landscapes (though, I suspect, doing said landscapes something of a disservice). And then there’s Snook, the Emmy-winner whose other post-Succession projects are somewhat baffling and ill-considered. Still, her presence is welcome—Snook is almost hilariously expressive, a person who I wouldn’t be surprised to find has trouble hiding her true emotions from being revealed on her face. She furrows her brow and narrows her eyes with such outspoken bewilderment, fear and disdain that it’s an artform unto itself. It’s just a shame that it’s in service of a lesser work.
The complaints of horror films that are “actually about trauma” have been done to death—by this writer herself, in fact.But it’s less about it being simply annoying that so many modern horror films fall back on similar themes and more about how they approach them. Horror, long a lowly-regarded genre, has always been about something more than what it’s given credit for; the monsters and things that go bump in the night have always stood in for the horror of the everyday. It’s the repetitive literalization of horror and mundane style; the overly transparent metaphors that climax with a public service announcement (*cough* The Night House) that frustrates us—then again, all films seem to be turning into mental health awareness lectures plagued by therapy-speak. Run Rabbit Run never gets that bad, but it never gets any good either, coasting on the success of previous films but unbothered to transcend them, to the point where the film isn’t actually about trauma but still obviously about trauma. The past comes back to haunt us—and didn’t we already know that?
Director: Daina Reid
Writer: Hannah Kent
Starring: Sarah Snook, Lily LaTorre, Damon Herriman, Greta Scacchi
Release Date: June 28, 2023 (Netflix)
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.