Run Rabbit Run
A thin storyline is eked out to breaking point, although Sarah Snook and Lily LaTorre, as mother and daughter, are exceptional.
All in the family: Sarah Snook. Image courtesy of Netflix
It’s a brave director who embarks on a full-length feature whose entire success rests on the performance of a child. Daina Reid, whose first film this is, has lucked out with Lily LaTorre, who more or less makes Run Rabbit Run her own. LaTorre, a Sydney-born eight-year-old, not only has a physiognomy designed for the big screen, but can be as natural or as chilling as the story demands. She’s in good company, too, with Sarah Snook – riding high off her success as Shiv in HBO’s Succession – as the other half of this two-man psychological melodrama.
Snook and LaTorre play mother and child, living on their own in a vast, comfortable Melbourne house, which may come as a surprise as Snook’s character, Sarah, is a fertility doctor who seems to spend little time at work. She’s got her hands full with her seven-year-old daughter Mia (LaTorre), who is beginning to show signs of disquieting behaviour, drawing disturbing images on the back of her fridge-mounted paintings that Sarah has mysteriously failed to notice. Mia then adopts a stray white rabbit, which is given plenty of screen time hopping around the house, but only after it has taken a chunk out of Sarah’s hand. In fact, due to the anorexic narrative, Daina Reid devotes a lot of her film to random shots of the rabbit, of Mia standing motionless in doorways, of Sarah’s feet, of hallways and of a creek at dusk. In spite of this, the film is remarkably drab visually and is terribly underlit, all the more surprising as three of the characters sleep with bedside lamps on. Generally Australian films, even the bad ones, make the most of the matchless scenery of the continent, but this is not one such.
Run Rabbit Run is one of those films that attempts to build its drama on what it conceals from the viewer, drip-feeding crumbs of exposition at convenient junctures. It also suggests that dramatic things are happening, as a cello is never far off the soundtrack. But the tone is problematic. It is unclear whether or not the film is a contemplation of loss, mental breakdown or something entirely more spectral. The mother-child Australian thriller The Babadook inevitably springs to mind, but on the other ends of the spectrum so does Persona and Mommie Dearest. Somebody is obviously going bonkers, but is it Sarah or Mia or Sarah’s mother Joan confined to a care home? In spite of her billing, Greta Scacchi has precious little screen time as Joan, who seems to have some psychological link to Mia, the grandchild she has never met – and it appears to cuts both ways. Personalities drift between actresses and there’s one scene of Sarah brandishing a steel trap that recalls Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. One suspects that Reid is not aiming for high camp, but after Sarah’s interminable drive across the Outback to see her mother, her departure after sixty seconds does seem impetuous. But when this happens a second time, it just seems daft – and prompts an unintentional titter.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Sarah Snook, Lily LaTorre, Damon Herriman, Greta Scacchi, Trevor Jamieson, Naomi Rukavina, Hugo Soysa, Shabana Azeez, Julia Davis.
Dir Daina Reid, Pro Anna McLeish, Naomi Mulholland and Sarah Shaw, Ex Pro Daina Reid and Sarah Snook, Screenplay Hannah Kent, Ph Bonnie Elliott, Pro Des Vanessa Cerne, Ed Nick Meyers, Music Mark Bradshaw and Marcus Whale, Costumes Marion Boyce, Sound Tom Heuzenroeder and Robert Mackenzie.
XYZ Films/Carver Films-Netflix.
100 mins. Australia. 2022. UK and US Rel: 28 June 2023. Cert. 15.
