Run Rabbit Run

dir: Daina Reid

2023

Horror. Purest horror.

That’s what parenting is like, apparently.

Of course people watching this flick will be muttering “Babadook, Babadook” under their breath, but no-one said The Babadook was either the most original horror flick ever nor that it had the monopoly on mad mothers wanting to strangle their kids for reasons in movies.

This flick, mostly filmed in Victoria and South Australia, is ominous and filled with dread right from the start. It’s not just the exquisite cinematography, or the choice of what’s filmed, but the discomforting soundtrack does a lot of the work too. Those cello / double bass slowly bowed strings…

And then there’s all the awful things happening on screen.

It’s mostly a two-hander, with Sarah Snook playing a character called Sarah, and Lily LaTorre playing her daughter. I won’t say the name of the daughter character, because apparently no one is quite sure what it should be.

We already know terrible things are going to happen, because the daughter, while being driven in the car, asks about where someone is who she’s never met, and the mere mention of her name is enough to make Sarah somehow look even paler.

At first the name being said is “Joan, where’s Joan, is Joan going to be there?” referring to the guest list for the daughter’s birthday party. The answer is an emphatic no, because the Joan in question is Sarah’s mum, and Sarah can’t stand her mum, plus her mum is in an old folk’s home. For old folks. Speaking of which, Sarah’s dad, mostly referred to as grandpa, has recently died, and both Sarah and her daughter miss him terribly.

Sarah especially seems wounded by grief at the loss. But there is something far more seriously wrong with Sarah, and wrong with the daughter, especially when she starts insisting that her name isn’t Mia, but is in fact Alice.

Alice. Alice? Who the fuck is Alice? That’s a name to conjure with. Plus there’s a white rabbit that seems to have appeared out of nowhere, who just hangs around ominously in the house, only earns its keep once when it takes a chunk out of Sarah’s hand.

Alice…white rabbit… I can’t tell if we’re through the looking glass or in a wonderland, but this flick is short on wonder, and long on dread. Mia keeps getting injuries, and Mummy Dearest keeps asking her if someone is hurting her, bullying her. Mia keeps shaking her head, but at random times seems to insist she’s not Mia anyway, she’s this other girl.

And Sarah doesn’t want to talk about Alice, because clearly she’s still traumatised by something that happened 30 years ago.

Like always in these flicks, the mum is either a widow or divorced. The ex-husband / still dad (Damon Herriman) is nice enough, but he’s got a new wife, and they’re trying for another kid, and for some reason this really brings out the Shiv Roy in Sarah, who is always either terrified and confused, or profoundly irritated by people trying to bring up the past all the time.

Snook is obviously best known for playing one of the lead failchildren in recently ended tv seriesSuccession (RIP Logan Roy), but she’s an accomplished actor completely separate from that series, having done phenomenal work in movies like Predestination and other shows like Secret River and The Beautiful Lie. She puts in solid work here, but let’s be honest, she just has to looked confused, scared or angry until that diabolical ending, and then she’s done.

The kid just has to be a kid. Kids are terrifying at the best of times. She does fine in the role, because while she has to be frustrating or annoying, she doesn’t have to imitate a demonically possessed midget monster. We just have to be confused, and then unsettled when we’re not sure whether she believes what she’s saying, about being someone else.

A lot of the flick will seem familiar to people who watch horror flicks, or thrillers, or whatever combination of maternal guilt / post-partum depression this genre works with. I would argue that a lot of it still works anyway, because the goal of these kinds of flicks is not to make sense, or be logical. Insisting on that flies out the window once you realise that what you’re seeing, from one person’s vantage point, is unlikely to be what’s actually happening.

Mostly, it’s when you realise that the person who’s viewpoint you’re seeing is unreliable, and that they don’t know what’s really happening either, because… Sarah’s choices don’t make a lot of sense to us throughout the film, but they don’t really have to make sense. What’s happening is happening, and a lot of it is because choices or actions were made or taken a long time ago, but the repercussions aren’t clear even to the person that made those choices, so they aren’t clear to us either until it’s way too late.

There is usually, even in horror, a prohibition or a reluctance to actually hurt or permanently harm kids. They can be in peril the whole time, but you’re not meant to really harm them. That seems to have been abandoned, this decade. I don’t have the smarts or the time to write a convincing argument about how it might have come to pass, or why, but let’s just say that this flick, like The Babadook, really pushes the limits of what (I think) audiences will accept / tolerate.

This flick is very committed to its story, and it doesn’t flinch from going down the darkest path possible. Some violence is too explicit, too insane, and the flick veers off from that moment (I’m referring to a scene with scissors, which didn’t make a lot of sense and made me want to stop watching the flick, but I carried on like the trooper that I am). Once the flick tends towards an explanation for what is happening, one which pretty much has its cake, eats it too, and then still somehow leaves it open with an ambiguous ending that implies but doesn’t literalise the worst.

And yet it seems like it’s only going to get worse even from there.

Sublimation. It’s an old concept in psychology. What happens when someone represses the past? It springs back up where it’s least wanted or intended, and wreaks havoc upon the innocent and guilty alike.

So much of this horror could have been avoided if Sarah had just gotten some therapy. But even there, it’s eventually implied that nothing was really going to stop the sins of the mothers being visited upon their daughters, with an almost Biblical implacability. It’s also a scenario that indicates Sarah is not only her own worst enemy, but everyone else’s as well.

I have to imagine this was a tough film to make. Snook’s only recently become a mum; Hannah Kent, acclaimed novelist and screenwriter here, also has two young’uns. They clearly have a lot to say about grief, regret, resentment, exhaustion, insomnia – all the good things that come with having kids, with none of the benefits (love, adoration, complete abandonment of one’s sense of self).

We get it, being a mum is hard, especially when you don’t have a supportive partner. But that’s no reason to repeat, on a loop, the dreadful past you’ve spent decades trying to flee from. That’s what makes it even more unbelievable when Sarah thinks she and Mia / Alice should pay a visit to the ancestral home…

It’s often hard to be critical of a flick, as in, not to criticise it but to critique aspects of it, even positively, when the experience itself is so disturbing and discomfiting. What I’m trying to say is that I can think a film is very well realised, and ends up very true to itself, so to speak, and a visual and auditory treat, and yet I can find myself not ever wanting to watch it again. It’s not that it’s gory, or visceral, and it doesn’t feel as harrowing, primal or deeply felt as The Babadook.

But it’s still a nightmare. A horrible, horrible nightmare that I can’t wake up from.

8 times being a parent seems to drive mothers to drink in these films out of 10

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“You don’t like me. You make me hide and hide.” – never to be found - Run Rabbit Run