If you thought Sarah Snook’s Shiv Roy had misgivings about impending motherhood on “Succession,” Shiv seems like the model of maternal stability compared to the divorced mother Snook plays in “Run Rabbit Run.”
The Australian psychological horror film plays like a greatest hits sampler from films such as “The Bad Seed,” “Orphan,” “The Sixth Sense,” “The Omen,” “Birth” and “Hereditary,” but never truly establishes its own identity or purpose. It’s a great-looking ride with a few legitimate jump-scares and some suitably chilling imagery, but the finale leaves us frustrated and let down, wondering: Is that all there is?
Directed with style albeit some predictable rhythms by Daina Reid from an intriguing screenplay by Hannah Kent that nonetheless feels a draft or two away from being complete, and filmed in suitably gloomy tones, “Run Rabbit Run” is infused with a sense of foreboding. Snook is a screen-commanding presence as Sarah, a fertility doctor who is still grieving her recently deceased father but trying to put on a brave face for the birthday of her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre), who is turning 7 and seems to have no friends other than her mom, her father Pete (Damon Herriman) and Pete’s partner Denise (Naomi Rukavina). Let’s just say we bear witness to one of the saddest and most unsettling birthday parties ever.
The “Alice in Wonderland” parallels kick in when a rabbit turns up out of nowhere on the doorstep of Sarah and Mia’s Melbourne home, and Mia instantly falls in love with it, even as Sarah hopes the thing will scamper away. (Sarah’s efforts to shoo the rabbit result in the rabbit biting Sarah. So many fresh and unhealed wounds of different kinds in this film, hmmmm.)
Mia takes to wearing a creepy, homemade rabbit mask, and we go deeper through the looking glass when Mia starts making references to someone named “Alice,” which Sarah finds greatly disturbing. At times Mia even insists she IS Alice, and when we learn the truth about Alice’s identity and how she ties into the story — yeah, that’s some weird and wild and effed up stuff, man.
We’re now clearly in My Precocious Kid is Freaking Me Out movie territory, as Sarah discovers the obligatory stash of grotesque drawings, and Mia talks about how much she misses the grandmother (Greta Scacchi) she’s never met, as Sarah is estranged from grandma, who is in a nursing home and seems to have dementia. “I miss people I’ve never met all the time,” says Mia in a matter-of-fact tone.
The checklist of horror movie tropes grows longer when the story shifts to Sarah’s childhood home in South Australia, which is located in the middle of nowhere and is conveniently — or should we say, inconveniently — near a cliff, uh-oh. Framed pictures on the wall are taken down, but then suddenly appear back in place. Nightmares occur in the dead of night. With the ominous score augmented by the obligatory creaking and sometimes slamming doors, we follow Sarah as she enters some kind of shed filled with rusty knives and tools; it looks like Leatherface’s Man Cave.
Oh, and as Mia grows increasingly difficult and rebellious, at one point screaming, “You’re a terrible person!” to her mother, the poor girl sustains injuries of mysterious origin.
Time and again, “Run Rabbit Run” plays with our perceptions. How much of what we are seeing is grounded in reality, and how much — if any — of this a figment of Sarah’s imagination? Snook is a gamer every step of the way, playing Sarah as a wounded, frightened, lost individual who occasionally reverts to almost childlike behavior. (We see only the briefest glimpse of Sarah at work, but if any of her patients knew about what was happening in her home life, they’d be racing for a new fertility doctor.) Lily LaTorre never once comes across as a child actor overdoing it; there’s a matter-of-factness to her performance that is almost frighteningly good. Ultimately, though, this comes across as a horror film made by a talented director who clearly loves the genre but couldn’t find a truly original path for this particular tale.
