SUNDANCE23 REVIEW: Run Rabbit Run [2023]

Rating: TV-MA | Runtime: 100 minutes
Release Date: June 28th, 2023 (Australia/USA)
Studio: Netflix
Director(s): Daina Reid
Writer(s): Hannah Kent

Can people come back?

I’m not sure which is creepier: seven-year-old Mia (Lily LaTorre) saying she “misses a lot of people she’s never met” or her telling her mom (Sarah Snook’s Sarah) that she misses “her mother” as though she isn’t her. And that’s without mentioning the creepy rabbit mask she makes and wears whenever Sarah’s frustration boils over to verbal and unintentional physical abuse. That discomfort is an intentional means of introducing a fluidity of identity and sanity.

Does Mia simply have an overactive imagination that’s blurred the line between fantasy and reality in the wake of her first birthday without her grandfather? Is Sarah’s grief for her father and a recently discovered familial history of dementia causing past trauma to manifest visions that aren’t there? Or has her long-lost sister Alice truly returned via Mia’s body? Maybe it’s a bit of everything.

Hannah Kent fills her script for Run Rabbit Run with many instances of duality that beg the question of whether we’re dealing with reincarnation (perhaps Alice is the bunny found on their doorstep, using Mia as a vessel whenever she must converse with Sarah) or hallucination (we can never be certain if any instance of blood is real or imagined).

Director Daina Reid does a great job visualizing this lifting of the veil with figures hiding in shadows while young LaTorre steals scenes opposite an unraveling Snook with uncanny ease, delivering lines that could be coming from Mia or Alice both. When the tension is high—a first visit with Sarah’s mother Joan (Greta Scacchi), returning home to find Mia missing, or Sarah’s climactic recovery of a hidden truth—it’s impossible to look away.

Unfortunately, however, there are a lot of lulls in between. Enough that I found my mind drifting away from the action to parse together the clues and figure out said truth before the midway point. It’s a testament to the writing that those pieces fit together so well, but the fact that the script itself tries so hard to deliberately shield us from those answers can become somewhat aggravating.

There’s a fine line between allowing the mystery to help facilitate Sarah’s descent into the nightmare Mia’s seventh year on earth triggers and letting it prolong the inevitable endgame beyond its limit. One lets the lead punish herself with ghosts. The other distracts the audience with parlor tricks. Thankfully, said tricks are compelling enough to keep us invested in witnessing whether the past might tragically repeat itself.