Daina Reid’s ‘Run Rabbit Run’
“Can people come back?” asks Mia, the cute little girl whose increasingly hair-raising antics are the crux of this atmospheric Midnight premiere from Australia. From the dead, she means, and it’s a macabre thought that Daina Reid’s effective but perhaps overlong debut feature film plays with quite tantalizingly, right until the end. The tease may disappoint commercial audiences who are eager to learn the truth. Run Rabbit Run The festival circuit and the arthouse will also be popular.
Like a lot of recent genre films with female leads — eg Ari Aster’s Hereditary or Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook — Reid’s film takes place in a time of fresh bereavement or recent marriage trauma. In this case, it’s both: Sarah (Sarah Snook), Mia’s mother, is dealing with her father’s death, but the hammer blow comes when her ex-husband announces that he and his new wife are trying for a baby, something she thought they’d both drawn a line under when they were a couple. Mia adopted a mysterious, white rabbit from her mother. It seems to have come out of nowhere and she reacts violently to her mother trying to throw it over the fence.
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Like the two films above, Run Rabbit Run Mia intentionally blurs the line between reality and abstraction. The confusion only grows when Mia, who is seven years old, claims that Sarah is her mother. The strangeness increases when Mia starts to insist that she is really Sarah’s sister Alice, who disappeared when she was also seven, and demands to meet Sarah’s estranged mother Joan (Greta Scacchi), now suffering from dementia. Mia’s behavior extends to school, where her teachers sagely note the strange, angry drawings she’s been doing, the dark and morbid kind that, in real life, would probably have social services round with a S.W.A.T. team.
Lily LaTorre, who plays Mia, is an absolute find in this regard, and her impressively unreadable, protean performance is the motor that drives the film (Cameron Bright as the young upstart in Jonathan Glazer’s mesmerizing 2004 reincarnation thriller Birth Though the end result is quite different, this movie comes to my mind. The film is based squarely on the shoulders Succession Snook, a star who does a lot, keeps us entertained until, or maybe even beyond, the point where we are truly amazed. Catherine Deneuve’s extraordinary performance in Repulsion casts a long shadow here; but even though the mere mention of Roman Polanski’s name these days brings people out in hives, her work there shouldn’t be forgotten, and Snook is really a match for that.
The main downside of Reid’s film is its staccato tone: it frequently fades to black for no good reason and, in the last half hour, this tends to suggest that the ending is going to be more impromptu and unsatisfying than it actually is. Likewise, there are certain tropes from Australian trauma dramas — family homes left untouched and unoccupied until the protagonists go back there — that don’t travel well. But Run Rabbit Run has a poetic resonance that, while not exactly a close relative of Sam Raimi’s 2009 horror Drag Me To HellThis makes for a horrifying essay on action and consequences, as well as the isolation and struggles that come with single parenthood.
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