Few things go together better than horror movies and spooky kids. The new movie from Netflix Run Rabbit run is a perfect example.
Carefully treading the line between horror and psychological thriller, Run Rabbit run stars Succession‘s Sarah Snook as a fertility doctor named Sarah. Sarah is still grieving over her mother’s passing when her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) starts acting extremely strange. More specifically, Mia calls herself “Alice” and claims she “wants to see her mom.” It turns out that Alice is the name of Sarah’s sister, who disappeared at about Mia’s age, and Sarah never told Mia about it. It just gets weirder and creepier from there.
As the movie progresses, Mia fades into her persona of Alice, knowing things only Alice would know. As life unravels, Sarah is forced to look deeper into her own past and confront her repressed memories and grief over Alice’s disappearance. This is true Run Rabbit run really shines, especially when compared to some of the other recent horror films that delve into trauma.
While trauma metaphors have dominated the horror film genre ever since The Babadook‘s release in 2014, the effectiveness of writers and directors drawing that connection is hit and miss. Movies like It follows, midsommaror M3GAN manage to capture their themes without getting lost in their analogies. Others, such as Smile, The boogeymanAnd Candymantake too much hand in their trauma plots, often losing sight of the scare or even their own story in the service of their allegories and themes.
Run Rabbit run completely avoids the clutter of metaphors by turning the trauma into the actual text: Mia turns from the source of Sarah’s worry as a parent to the source of her grief as a sister. By diving headlong into the protagonist’s trauma rather than talking around it, director Daina Reid (Apple TV’s Radiant girls) can play with more surreal imagery and distorting realities, twisting and distorting Sarah’s world through the lens of her pain, sadness, and maybe even some repressed memories. It’s a powerful and often unsettling combination that gives the movie an eerie vibe and some of its most effective and terrifying moments.
The movie’s immediacy can’t mitigate all the issues plaguing the recent spate of traumatic horror films. make the rest of the final act so poignant in favor of a too-clean scene that easily fades from memory. But even without fully holding the landing, Run Rabbit run is still one of the most interesting Netflix releases of the year so far, and easily one of the better horror options.
Run Rabbit run now streaming on Netflix.