‘Run Rabbit Run’: ‘Succession’ Star Sarah Snook vs. a Very Bad Bunny
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Admit it: You would totally want to watch Shiv from Succession go toe to toe with a supernatural bad bunny.
That’s how Run Rabbit Run sells itself initially, or at least it’s the general direction that this Australian horror film points you toward. You’ve got Sarah Snook, a strong contender among many for the Most Valuable Player of HBO’s hit show, playing a single mother — also named Sarah — who’s already a little edgy when we meet her. And you’ve got a mysterious rabbit that shows up on her doorstep, a birthday gift for her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) from parties unknown. The kid loves it. Mom, not so much. Dodgy pet vibes and whatnot. When she tries to get rid of their furry friend later that night, the animal bites her hand. He’s got a vicious streak a mile wide! And let us assure you that you truly have not lived until you’ve heard the (hopefully) future Emmy winner tell a floppy-eared, nose-twitching lil’ wabbit to straight-up fuck off.
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It’s around the time that this uninvited chomper of carrots inserts itself into Sarah’s life that things get a little odd. Mia makes the world’s creepiest cut-out rabbit mask and wears it around the house. She spots a decades-old picture of two children, one buried deep in a box that’s rarely opened, and declares that it’s hers. Out of the blue, Mia begins asking to talk to Joan, a.k.a. Sarah’s estranged mother (Greta Scacchi), whom the eight-year-old has never met before. Yet the grandmother immediately recognizes the child upon first sight: “I’ve been looking for you so long! Where have you been?!” The elderly woman also calls the girl “Alice,” which causes Mia to nod. That was the name of Sarah’s sister, who went missing when they both very young. To say Sarah is unnerved by all of this does not even come close to describing the perilous state of her sanity.
All the while, that rascally rabbit is skulking around, watching and waiting for… something? Maybe? Veteran TV director Daina Reid and screenwriter Hannah Kent have an endgame in mind, one involving psychological unravelings, bodily harm, generational trauma, terrifying-as-fuck kids’ drawings, the return of the repressed, and that ol’ chestnut about you being done with the past, but the past not being done with you. Where the bunny fits in, however, remains a big cartoon question mark: Is it the harbinger of something wicked this way comes? What connection does it have to the family’s original sin? Does it simply represent the filmmakers’ theory that the Kuleshov Experiment works even better on animals than it does on humans? (Bunny angry. Cut — now bunny evil. Cut — now bunny very evil.) Will the rabbit try to make an 11th-hour bid to take over Waystar Royco? The mind boggles.
That so much of Run Rabbit Run is ambiguous can be seen as a feature and not a bug, though the fact that you’re left feeling like the pink-eyed creature is simply a red herring points to the movie’s weakness as a whole. When the movie works, it can briefly conjure up that feeling you get right before you wake up from a particularly bad nightmare. (Also, never underestimate the power of a background figure loitering out of focus and in the shadows.) When it doesn’t, you have the sensation of one horror-film cliché after another haphazardly colliding into each other and merely kicking up creepy genre dust. It’s capable of quickly upshifting from tense to intense, and also of having the appearance of a scary movie rather than being one.
Such inconsistency is usually a dealbreaker, unless you’ve got someone who can guide you through the dead space and past the rough patches — and this is where Snook comes in. Anyone who’s watched her in Succession knows she can play the emotional scales. But this is the sort of role that requires a performer to give reaction shots that are little more than the tiniest seismic tremors and sequences that necessitate nuclear meltdowns. The Aussie actor has got both in her bag of tricks; Snook’s full-blown freak-out game is tight.
You hate to wish for a star to continue suffering for your enjoyment onscreen ad infinitum, yet her willingness to throw herself into a ghost story as warped and through-the-wringer as this bodes well for us. Run Rabbit Run does not end up giving you the Snook version of this. But the movie will make you believe that its lead has a long and fruitful future career in psychological thrillers if she wants it.
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