Darah Snook, Lily LaTorre
“Run Rabbit Run” My rating: C+ (Netflix)
100 minutes | No MPAA rating
The folks who made the Netflix thriller “Run Rabbit Run” cannot get out from under the big shadow cast by 2014’s “The Babadook.”
Both films are from Australia, both are about a single mother whose child exhibits threatened/threatening behavior, both ride a fine line between the supernatural and the psychological.
But whereas “The Babadook” got under your skin (thanks to a klller perf from Essie Davis as a terrified parent), “…Rabbit…” is more clinical than involving. It definitely is not scary.
And if it’s not scary, what’s the point?
Sarah Snook (late of HBO’s “Succession”) plays Sarah, a divorced obstetrician with an adorable young daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre).
Sarah starts getting reports from school that Mia is exhibiting troubling behavior. Like, she’s drawing horrific scenes on the back of her classroom artwork. Then the child fashions a hand-torn rabbit mask from construction paper and refuses to take it off (she looks like a bad dream in the wake of a “Donny Darko” viewing).
And then Mia begins insisting that she is not Mia, but rather Alice, Sarah’s younger sister who more than 30 years earlier disappeared from the family’s remote farmhouse.
Sarah is freaked…clearly she has been suppressing memories of that traumatic experience, and Mia’s insistence that she is Alice is triggering some disturbing flashbacks.
Hannah Kent’s screenplay tosses out all sorts of possibilities — ghostly possession, reincarnation, guilt-triggered dementia — but never settles on any of them. Moreover, the deep, dark secret at the heart of the old mystery is so obvious that only the densest viewer will fail to see it coming.
Director Daina Reed tries to compensate with oodles of atmosphere, especially once Sarah and Mia decamp to the long-empty house where Sara grow up. Bonnie Elliott’s cinematography finds all sorts or creepy possibilities in the commonplace and the landscape — the house is perched on a cliff over a broad river (all sorts of ways for a child to go missing) — is eerily dreamlike.
Your final response to “Run Rabbit Run” is likely to be “Is that all there is?”
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
I just finished watching it tonight and I must say except for the creepy music, the film was less than satisfying. I forced myself to stay awake, actually. The main performance by Sarah Snook as Sarah was the only gratifying element in the film. And considering that the principal character was an obstetrician, there were scant scenes of her actually working. She seemed never to be working, actually, throughout the film, as she gets mired into the perplexing mystery of her daughter claiming to be the long-lost sister known as Alice. I would not recommend the film overall.