Netflix’s new thriller Run Rabbit Run lets Sarah Snook confront trauma head on
Few things go together better than horror movies and haunted kids. Netflix’s new movie 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’s still carrying quite a bit of grief over the passing of her mother when her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) starts acting extremely strange. More specifically, Mia refers to herself as “Alice,” and claims that she wants to “see her mom.” As it turns out, Alice is the name of Sarah’s sister, who disappeared at about Mia’s age, and Sarah never told Mia about. Things only get weirder and creepier from there.
Related
As the movie goes on, Mia disappears into her persona of Alice, knowing things that only Alice would. 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 where Run Rabbit Run really shines, especially compared to some of the other recent horror movies that delve into trauma.
While trauma metaphors have dominated the horror movie genre since The Babadook’s release in 2014, the effectiveness of writers and directors drawing that connection has been hit or miss. Movies like It Follows, Midsommar, or M3GAN manage to nail their themes without getting too lost in their analogies. Others, like Smile, The Boogeyman, and Candyman, take too heavy a hand in their trauma plots, often losing sight of the scares or even their own story in service of their allegories and themes.
Run Rabbit Run avoids the messiness of metaphor entirely by making the trauma the actual text: Mia morphs from the source of Sarah’s worry as a parent into the source of her
Read more on polygon.com
