The horror genre is littered with creepy kid movies; some, like “The Babadook” and “Us,” are vastly better than others. Unfortunately, even with clear evocations of both those films, “Run Rabbit Run” by director Daina Reid (“Shining Girls”) and screenwriter Hannah Kent is not destined to be a classic of this sub-genre. Despite a solid performance from Sarah Snook (“Succession”), this Sundance midnight selection remains more of a premise than a fully fleshed-out feature, with thinly sketched characters and a heavy reliance on visual and sound clichés to make up for what it’s missing in actual chills.
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Snook plays a fertility doctor named Sarah, who is still grieving the death of her father. After a white rabbit mysterious shows up on her doorstep on the seventh birthday of her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre, in a debut performance that makes the creepy kid that makes the son from “The Babadook,” seem like a peach), Sarah starts noticing strange changes in the girl. Mia insists on wearing a weird pink rabbit mask to school, becomes withdrawn and ill-tempered, and later insists that her mother call her “Alice” and that she misses “Joan.”
A phone call from a nursing home reveals her estranged mother named, you guessed it, Joan (Greta Scacchi, “The Player”), is showing signs of dementia. Scacchi is barely given anything to do with this role beyond using the symptoms of dementia as fodder for what the filmmakers think is scary. The way in which they leverage these painful emotions for otherworldly spookiness straddles the line of good taste and does a disservice not just to the actress but also to anyone who either has dementia or has a loved one with the deteriorative disease.
After repeatedly insisting that she must see Joan, Sarah relents and takes the girl to visit her. Joan immediately calls the girl “Alice” and says she belongs to her. The girl and her grandmother have to be almost violently removed from each other’s embrace. Later, back at Sarah’s childhood home, Mia is drawn to a certain bedroom, insisting that it is her’s. Finally broken down by Mia’s bewildering behavior, Sarah reveals to her daughter that Alice was her sister who went missing. . at seven years old.
If you’ve gotten this far in the film, you probably already know where it’s heading. If there is any pleasure to be had in seeing the rest of the film out, it would have to be found in the way Kent’s script takes us there. Unfortunately, it’s riddled with clichéd character decisions that are not made fresh by any of Reid’s directorial choices.
The cinematography is murky, permanently casting an orange haze over the house night and day. This is out in the country, so of course, there is an abandoned shed filled with rusty rabbit traps and a large, creepy armoire that Sarah just has to go into late at night, alone, where unnatural sights and sounds surround her. When Sarah sits alone at a table, Mia appears in the corner of the frame, only to disappear when Sarah turns around. Other specters appear in dark corners and hidden places, just out of focus.
Reid also relies on a loud, eerie soundscape filled with reverb-laden whispers and whimpers, and howling winds to evoke a spookiness the plot and her imagery have not earned. Without these sounds doing the heavy lifting, all the many, many shots of the mysterious white rabbit looking back at Sarah are just not scary or ominous in the slightest. A scene where Sarah stares at a photograph on the wall of her next to her sister could have contained a modicum of emotional resonance had Reid just let it play out rather than again using the cacophonous soundscape to tell the audience that she wants them to feel scared at this moment.
For her part, Snook does what she can with this under-baked story. She plays Sarah as tightly wound as possible. A woman who seems to have never taken an easy breath in her entire life. She is particularly ill at ease with her daughter, overly careful one minute and overly strict the next. Because the script relies so heavily on withholding information from the audience, it also means Sarah’s conflicted emotions are rarely given a chance to surface, which in turn holds back Snook from finding something deeper within this character.
Along with her estrangement from her mother, Sarah is no longer with Mia’s father Pete (Damon Herriman, “The Nightingale”). He is clearly part of her life, attending Mia’s birthday with his new wife and her child. Occasionally they even attempt to co-parent over the phone. But it’s never very clear why Mia barely has a relationship with Pete or why he doesn’t notice the changes in her behavior. That is until he’s needed for a plot point in the film’s ridiculous final act and then disappears again completely.
His appearance in the film’s third act is just one of the many absurd moments in the final thirty minutes that lumber toward its painfully obvious reveal. Yet, it is made even more absurd by the handful of scenes without him that the filmmakers tack on to the end, which add nothing emotionally to what’s come before aside from unnecessarily prolonging the film’s already overstretched run time.
Perhaps this concept looked good on paper, but in execution, “Run Rabbit Run” does nothing to transcend its influences, finds nothing insightful to say about the various familial relationships its fails to explore, traps its talented cast in unmemorable characters, and — worst of all for a horror film — contains no scenes that are truly chilling and or any imagery that will stick in the viewer’s mind once the film is over. [D]
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