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?