REVIEW: ‘Run Rabbit Run’ is an Unnerving Spiral

Children carrying the sins of their parents isn’t new in storytelling, and it’s especially not new in horror. However, once you identify what’s happening, the narrative usually becomes stale. That can’t be said for Run Rabbit Run, an Australian psychological horror film that pulls you in close to the characters only to send you down an unnerving spiral that reveals layers of mystery and guilt through a possibly supernatural lens. Each layer is slowly peeled away and through atmospheric cinematography, environmental elements, and the houses themselves, director Daina Reid and writer Hannah Kent have created a story that pinches the viewer harder and harder until the unsettling end.

In Run Rabbit Run, Sara (Sarah Snook), a fertility doctor, has her values challenged and must confront a ghost from her past when she notices strange behavior from her young daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre). With a set understanding of the cycle of life, from conception to death, Sara is a scientist through and through. But when her daughter Mia starts acting strange, Sara has to let her logical guard down and accept that things may be more than what she sees. An awkward family from the start, Sara and Mia are a pair that seem disconnected, even though they’re mother and daughter.

To start, Mia wants to keep a rabbit that showed up in their yard, and Sara wants it gone. That rabbit kickstarts strange behavior from Mia who slowly begins to take on characteristics of Sara’s dead relative. Growing increasingly intense in their length and physical manifestations, Mia’s connection to her mother’s past moves from intriguing to terrifying when things get physical and both child and mother begin to lose their grip on what is happening in reality. Starting with a rabbit and ending in a visceral finale, Run Rabbit Run thrills as much as it unsettles.

In equal measure, Sarah Snook and Lily LaTorre’s performance as mother and daughter and alone are viscerally good. Good in the way that makes you squirm and gets under the skin. Good in the way that makes you angry and scared from one beat to the next. While LaTorre’s performance as Mia will go into the famed halls of creepy children in horror, it’s also much more than that. She acts beyond her young years, keeping the viewer engaged in both a physical sense when her face is covered and an emotional sense when you get to see the fear, malice, and mystery in her eyes. But while LaTorre gives a fantastic performance, it’s Snook who makes Run Rabbit Run the terrifying experience that it is.

While fans of Snook’s work know her from Succession, where she played the cold and calculated Shiv, Snook’s turn in Run Rabbit Run captures the depth of emotion she can bring to a role when allowed to stop being calculating and start being a damaged mother with vulnerabilities that push her farther and farther off a ledge. As Sara, Snook is terrifying, not because she is a monster mommy or evil herself, but because she shows the audience what it’s like to spiral a drain with a painful slowness that leaves you helpless to do anything but lose yourself.

The film’s only fault is how often it retreads the same path. By using the past to inform the present and build up Sara’s confusion, the narrative repeats itself constantly. While it’s solid exposition at first, similar moments play out and offer no real additive as the run time goes. That said, despite the pacing issues the performances carry this film home.

Run Rabbit Run has a solid but simple premise, yet the performances of its leads make this grief-stricken yet guilty story last after the credits roll. With a confusing blurring of memory with reality, everything ends up working well to craft tension first and foremost. And it’s done by making you care for the people at the center of the narrative instead of any spectacle they’re a part of.

Run Rabbit Run is streaming now exclusively on Netflix.