Sarah’s (Sarah Snook), a medical worker’s life is falling apart. She is struggling with the death of her father, her mother’s illness, and her divorce from her husband, Pete (Damon Herriman). Her relationship with her young daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre), is also unexpectedly deteriorating. The girl picks up a strange white rabbit from the street and from that moment on, behaves strangely: she says she misses her grandmother, whom she has never met, asks to be called by the name of a missing aunt, and wears a creepy cardboard mask. At first, Sarah tries to keep everything under control, but gradually her mental and physical state collapses. Sarah is frightened by her own child.
Sarah Snook as Sarah in a still from “Run Rabbit Run”
Australian directors are masters of demonizing middle-class families. In “The Babadook,” a single mother blames her son for her husband’s death, and in “Relic,” the characters go through several stages of accepting death: first, they are afraid of a relative with dementia, but soon realize that they too are on the path of physical and mental decay. Despite another awkward localization by distributors, Daina Reid’s “Run Rabbit Run” is another Australian film in a series of slow-paced, poetic, and frighteningly candid films about dysfunctional families.
The Unfolding Horror
Lily LaTorre as Mia in a still from “Run Rabbit Run”
The film starts ambitiously: ghosts, demons, and other evil spirits are relegated to the background – in old, creepy photographs and as phantom apparitions of the past. Not a single jump scare or screamer in 100 minutes of running time: the whole film is an endless torment of paranoia. At one moment, the viewer thinks that little Mia is behaving menacingly and is about to do something to her exhausted mother. But later, suspicion falls on Sarah herself: perhaps the woman is losing her mind due to unresolved traumas and sees a threat in her child’s harmless attempts to find herself.
A Masterclass in Suspense
Sarah Snook as Sarah in a still from “Run Rabbit Run”
The agonizing anticipation of trouble is the driving force of the film. It is unknown what exactly threatens Sarah and Mia: whether it is themselves, or – thanks to localization – a family curse, or even a demonic force that has come from nowhere. To create suspense, Daina Reid borrows from, it seems, all the masters of the genre: the dirty poetry of Australian life – from Justin Kurzel and his “Snowtown,” melancholy and family traumas – from Nicolas Roeg and “Don’t Look Now,” and the languid lighting and lulling smooth camera movements – from modern colleagues from A24. Sometimes the imitation is successful, but more often the film seems overly symbolic and metaphorical: birds crashing into cars and meaningful, ominous masks that the heroine’s daughter constantly wears threaten to steal all the attention.
The Missing Punchline
But worst of all, the film completely lacks a deafening punchline: neither a dwarf killer in a red cloak from “Don’t Look Now,” nor a tragic denouement in the spirit of a Greek tragedy from Kurzel’s debut film. “Run Rabbit Run” is a film of one trick: strange things happen in a strange family, and it will definitely end badly. Reid plays with suspense so much that she forgets about catharsis. Therefore, the agonizing 100 minutes of waiting end with the most vulgar plot twist from serial melodramas, as if a scary story around a campfire ended with a corny joke.