Daina Reid’sRun Rabbit Runon Netflix is a thrilling psychological horror film that walks a thin line differentiating it between a horror film and a psychological drama focusing on mental health. FollowingSuccessionstarSarah Snookas a struggling mother who, one day, finds that her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) has started impersonating her missing sister Alice,Run Rabbit Runexplores the struggles of coping with loss and trauma while navigating parenthood. As Sarah struggles to cope with the loss of her father and the mysteries of her past,Run Rabbit Runpresents a compelling thriller that evokes questions about mental health and recurrent trauma. The dubious ending of theAustralian filmon Netflix leaves quite a few unanswered questions for the audiences to explore, once the harsh truth about the protagonist’s struggle is exposed.
Sarah Snook Is a Troubled Mother in ‘Run Rabbit Run’
Run Rabbit Runpicks up on the day of Mia’s birthday. Mia’s mother, Sarah (Snook), wakes up from what seems to be a rough night and wishes her sweet daughter on her special day. At the breakfast table, the mother and daughter discuss the list of invitees for the party in the evening. Mia expresses her sadness at her grandpa, who recently passed away, not attending her birthday party this year. However, Mia’s day turns mildly better when she returns home from school to find a stray rabbit waiting for her at the door of her house. Sarah’s suggestion that the rabbit may have escaped from somebody’s backyard does not keep Mia from showering her love on the cute little animal. Later in the evening, Mia’s father Pete (Damon Herriman) and his current partner arrive for the birthday party. Meanwhile, Sarah shows signs of emotional struggle as she is yet to fathom her father’s death. For some reason, Sarah chooses to keep her grandma’s birthday card away from Mia. To add to her agony, she gets bitten by the rabbit while trying to help it escape. Unfortunately for Sarah, Mia witnesses Sarah’s attempt at letting the rabbit loose.
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The next day when Sarah wakes up, she finds Mia standing in front of her with a pink-colored rabbit-shaped cutout on her face. For a bit, Mia acts upset with Sarah, but she continues to ask questions about her grandma Joan, who apparently she has never met. In the night, Mia asks Sarah for a photo of Joan, suggesting that she might find one in her grandpa’s boxes that Sarah has been unable to get rid of even long after her father’s death. Behind Mia’s back, Sarah musters the courage to look into her father’s belongings and finds a photograph of herself with her sister, Alice. When suddenly Mia appears and snatches the photograph from Sarah’s hand, suggesting that she has been looking for it, Sarah is surprised. Sarah takes the photograph from Mia’s hand and takes her to bed only to find that Mia had gotten her hands again on the photograph in the middle of the night. When Sarah retrieves the photograph again, Mia mentions that the photograph belongs to her. She also expresses her yearning to meet her grandma Joan.
Forced by Mia’s insistence to meet Joan, Sarah takes Mia to the aged care facility where Joan was admitted by Sarah’s father. A couple of strange events take place on the way. Sarah thinks she accidentally hit an animal, and Mia suffers a bloody nose. When they reach Joan’s care facility, Sarah finds out that her mother Joan (Greta Scacchi) issuffering from dementia. Weirdly, when Joan meets Mia, she addresses her as Alice and suggests that she belongs to her. This triggers Sarah who takes off with Mia despite Mia’s insistence to stay. When she accidentally hurts Mia, Sarah then hurts herself by shutting her car door on herself, in an act of compensation.
The situation gets more grim than before when Mia asks Sarah to call her Alice and suggests that Sarah is not her mother. This suggestion aligns with Mia’s growing yearning to meet Joan. More hurdles keep coming Sarah’s way when the school calls her to inform her about the worrying case of Mia as she clearly seems to be in distress. Moreover, Pete also asks Sarah to let Mia have a relationship with her grandmother. By this time, Sarah’s troubled past in relation to her sister is also hinted at. Finally, Sarah decides to revisit her past and takes Mia to her childhood home where she lived with her father. As Mia continues to come up with weird drawings and suffers bleeding occasionally, her insistence to be identified with Alice remains constant. Finding herself in a perplexing situation, Sarah reveals to Mia that Alice was her sister who went missing when she was 7 years old. Upon hearing this, Mia confirms that Sarah’s sister Alice is back, although Sarah continues to suspect that possibly Pete or Denise told Mia about Alice.
What Happened to Alice in ‘Run Rabbit Run’?
Hereon, Sarah is seen to have quickly started losing her sense of reality as memories from her haunting past and hallucinations take over, helping provide a clear picture of what happened to Alice years ago. It turns out that Alice and Sarah were playing a game of hide-and-seek when Sarah locked Alice inside a cabinet in the barn. When Sarah opened the cabinet, a furious Alice tried to strangle Sarah with her hands and Sarah used a rabbit trap that was lying nearby to defend herself, leaving Alice with injuries quite similar to the ones she had noticed on Mia lately. Afterward, when Alice started running away, Sarah chased her to a cliff. In the end, Sarah pushed her sister off the cliff and lied to her parents, saying that Alice had run away. Sarah’s own guilt behind her sister’s death potentially explains her distant relationship with her mother, who possibly holds Sarah responsible for Alice running away. At the end ofRun Rabbit Run, Sarah decides to confront the truth about Alice’s disappearance as she reveals to her sick mother that Alice would not return because she is dead. She also explains to Mia that she lied to Joan about Alice’s disappearance. On coming across this truth, Mia calls Sarah a monster — something Sarah agrees to.
The final scene of Run Rabbit Run shows Mia sliding out of her sleeping mother’s arms to look for her pet rabbit. When Sarah wakes up and goes looking for her daughter, she finds Mia walking away, along with her sister Alice. Sarah yells helplessly to stop her daughter as she fears that Mia may just meet the fate that once her sister Alice did as a result of her actions.Run Rabbit Runends on a cliffhanger as Mia’s fate is left open for speculation. While the film shows signs of exploring the supernatural in a few instances, it tends to weigh more on the side of a psychological thriller that banks on the deteriorating mental makeup of Sarah to create the conditions for a potentially supernatural explanation. However, once the truth behind Alice’s disappearance becomes evident, the cause behind Sarah and Mia’s experiences also surfaces. By the end, it becomes quite clear that Sarah’s struggle with Mia is catapulted by her guilt that gets suddenly triggered by the passing of her father, who was a pillar of support for Sarah.
Was Mia Haunted by Alice’s Ghost in ‘Run Rabbit Run’?
While Mia seems to be the one acting strangely in the beginning, it is established by the end that much of what Mia seemed to have experienced inRun Rabbit Runcould be a result of Sarah’s worsening mental health taking over. From the injuries noticed on Mia’s body by Sarah to the presence of Alice around her, all seem to be conjured by Sarah’s mind as she finds herself being drawn down by the horrifying circumstances that led to her sister’s demise — something Sarah is directly responsible for. When Sarah also draws a similar drawing that was supposedly being drawn by Mia earlier, it is clarified that Sarah was the one who was imagining the drawings whereas Mia had nothing to do with their appearances. Moreover, the other characters, noticing Sarah’s struggle, continue to request Sarah to seek help, but she ignores the advice, fearing that it would expose a secret that she has kept hidden for years. Even the film’s ending, which shows Mia being taken away by Alice, seems to be a result of Sarah’s innermost fear taking over. It may be the case that Mia did not actually jump off the same cliff from which Sarah pushed Alice. Regardless of whether there was actually something supernatural about the events that Sarah and Mia experience,Run Rabbit Runbuilds quite a case for a compelling thriller by navigating the gray area between thereality and the supernatural.
