Motherness is chaos. Just ask any wretched mother in film history: Mia Farrow’s wide-eyed, paranoia-ridden Rosemary Woodhouse; Margaret White, Carrie’s religious fanatic who mistakes punishment for protection; the bloodthirsty Pamela Voorhees; the abusive Norma Bates.
Nowhere, however, is there more of a mummy problem than Australia, a country that hosts some of cinema’s most hilarious forays into hapless mums in recent memory. See: The Babadook’s young widow defending her precocious son against a frail storybook beast. Or 2020’s Relic, where three generations of women grapple with their relationships with each other while facing some pesky demon who interrupts their family reunion. Or, of course, Toni Collette’s long-suffering matriarch in Hereditary, her instantly famous diatribe – “I AM YOUR MOTHER!” – sending shockwaves through every sullen-mouthed mama’s boy. If cinema can telegraph national identity, then Australia needs to go to therapy immediately.
Into that vein comes director Dinah Reid’s Run Rabbit Run , an Australian mummy-horror so indebted to its predecessors that it feels derivative by default. The clichés fly thick and fast: the wind rustling in the distance, a barren landscape streaked with bare branches, eerie dreams peppered with eerie imagery. And that’s just the first five minutes. It’s not long before we meet the most important figure: mother Sarah (Sarah Snook) and her creepy daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre).
It’s Mia’s seventh birthday, but everything is dark. Miya’s grandfather recently passed away, and mother and daughter are still dealing with the effects of his death. The sky is pale and the house – a cool place somewhere in the city – easily drowns out its two occupants. Sarah battles melancholy to organize a birthday celebration: a quiet affair with her ex-husband Pete (Damon Herriman) and his new partner Denise (Naomi Rukavina).
A white bunny somehow got into the house, to Mia’s delight and Sarah’s dismay. It takes hiding under tables and in eerie corridors: an unwelcome guest whose presence is more delightful than unsettling. We return to the rabbit throughout the night, sometimes in spine-tingling close-up, its eyes glinting devilishly in the blue darkness. Not since Monty Python is there a rabbit so bloodthirsty looking; it’s no wonder Sarah tries—and fails—to chase the wild creature away when she thinks no one is watching. “Come on,” she scolds the bunny, who promptly bites her.
The bunny becomes one of the most enticing elements of Run Rabbit Run. His arrival may be a reference to Lewis Carroll, especially given the name of Sarah’s sister – Alice – who disappeared as a child. But the film quickly strips away the mystery of the bunny (supernatural or just weird?) to focus on Mia’s increasingly hostile behavior. Something is wrong after her birthday: she suddenly insists on visiting Joan (Greta Scacchi), Sarah’s long-estranged mother, whom Mia has never met. Before long, Mia insists that she is the reincarnation of Alice.
These are certainly intriguing threads, but they can’t help but feel recycled. Mia’s weird, creepy quirks are pulled straight out of The Babadook; Sarah’s strained relationship with her ailing mother is too close to Relic, with which this film shares two producers. Snook, of course, is typically excellent, fresh from her turn as the Succession irritant, envisioning Shiv Roy in another edgy role here – but even her performance, as she rises to maddened delirium, is reminiscent of Toni Collette in Hereditary.