The Rabbit Hole of Almost-Horror
Run Rabbit Run is the kind of movie that makes you double-check your Netflix settings to see if you accidentally clicked “AI-generated horror template: maternal guilt edition.” An Australian psychological horror about a mother, a creepy kid, and a traumatic past, it arrives armed with a strong lead in Sarah Snook, sun-bleached atmosphere, and enough references to better movies to qualify as a group citation. What it doesn’t arrive with is anything resembling surprise. Or escalation. Or, you know… a pulse. Critics have already called it derivative, overreliant on stale tropes, and thinly plotted, and for once, the aggregator blurbs aren’t exaggerating.
Motherhood, Trauma, and Déjà Vu
On paper, the premise fits comfortably in the “prestige horror about motherhood” niche: Sarah is a fertility doctor whose seven-year-old daughter Mia starts acting weird after a stray rabbit turns up, and soon the kid insists she’s actually Alice, Sarah’s long-missing sister. That should be fertile territory (sorry) for psychological dread. Instead, the movie feels like it watched The Babadook, Relic, and Hereditary in one night and woke up the next morning with a hangover and no original ideas. Multiple critics have pointed out that every major beat feels borrowed, and not in a clever remix way—more like photocopy-of-a-photocopy. Sarah Snook Deserved Hazard Pay
The one thing Run Rabbit Run absolutely has going for it is Sarah Snook, who throws herself into this anxious, unraveling mother with the same intensity she brought to high-finance family screaming matches in Succession. She stalks through rooms, eyes hollowing out, jaw clenched, carrying the entire film on her back like she’s smuggling a better script under her coat. Reviewers have called her performance “arresting” and “a saving grace,” which is polite critic-speak for “she’s doing Olympic-level work in a film that keeps tripping over its own shoelaces.”
Mia, Masks, and Missed Opportunities
Lily LaTorre as Mia is another bright spot, which makes it almost cruel how undercooked her arc is. The rabbit mask, the unblinking stare, the insistence on being Alice—this should be nightmare fuel. Kids being creepy is Horror 101, and the film sets her up perfectly. Then it just… loops. Mia is withdrawn, Mia is weird, Mia says unsettling things, repeat. We get disturbing drawings on homework, playground hiding, and the usual “is she possessed or is Mom losing her mind?” ambiguity, but the script never lets the girl become truly frightening or tragic. She’s stuck in limbo as a walking metaphor for unresolved guilt, wearing a mask that ends up more interesting than the story behind it.
The Rabbit as Symbol: Somebunny Tried Too Hard
About that rabbit. White rabbits in horror usually scream “allegory incoming,” and this one is no exception. There are allusions to Alice in Wonderland, a bite that infects Sarah’s hand, and repeated imagery that’s clearly meant to be loaded with meaning. Several critics have noted, though, that the poor creature inspires neither interest nor dread—it’s just sort of… there, hopping around as if waiting for the screenplay to decide what it stands for. The result is less “rich symbolism” and more “Easter decoration wandered onto set and no one wanted to move it.”
Atmosphere for Days, Scares on Layaway
Visually, the movie looks great. The Australian landscape is shot like a chilly emotional void, all wind, concrete, and hostile open space. Critics have praised the “moody and atmospheric” direction, and you can see why: every frame is calibrated for dread. Problem is, it stops there. The film is so obsessed with being atmospheric that it forgets to be scary. You get a lot of dimly lit hallways, slow walks, and murmured conversations, but the actual horror payoff is minimal. One review nailed it: it’s all mood without visceral payoff, with the nastiest moment being a hand injury that feels more “Ouch, that’s gonna bruise” than “I may never sleep again.”
Plot Twists You Can See from Space
Psychological horror lives and dies on uncertainty. Here, you can outline the trajectory by the 20-minute mark: grief, repression, creepy kid echoes dead sister, terrible childhood memory revealed, tragic cliff symbolism, rinse and repeat. The movie keeps hinting that a deeper, more unsettling truth is coming, but when the “reveal” arrives—that Sarah caused Alice’s death and lied about it—it lands with all the shock of a calendar reminder. Multiple critics complained that the film “keeps hinting at depth that never comes” and that its pile-up of tropes feels blandly familiar. Hallucinations by Template
Sarah’s mental unraveling should be the spine of the film, but it plays like a greatest hits reel of psychological-horror clichés: mysterious injuries, waking fugue states, smashed family photos, seeing drowned girls everywhere, and cutting herself to mirror her child’s harm. None of this is inherently bad; it’s how you execute it. Here, the hallucinations arrive right on cue, never escalating into anything truly bizarre or nightmarish. They feel more like required beats than glimpses into a unique psyche—“insert vision here” as per the manual.
Joan, Alice, and the Ghost of a Better Movie
There’s an interesting film buried under all this, one that really explores dementia, generational trauma, and the way families rewrite their own histories. Greta Scacchi’s Joan, fading in and out of reality, and the spectral presence of Alice hint at a richer, more complicated story about how memory punishes the living. But the movie never turns that thematic material into drama; it just uses it as sad wallpaper behind the Sarah/Mia two-hander. By the time we reach the final image—Mia and “Alice” walking hand-in-hand toward the cliff—it’s less haunting than inevitable. You don’t feel devastated, just mildly impressed the film resisted slapping on a jump scare.
Prestige Horror Without the “Prestige”
In an era where psychological horror about motherhood has given us genuinely groundbreaking work, Run Rabbit Runfeels like a latecomer to a party where all the good conversations already happened. Critics have compared it unfavorably to the very films it’s clearly emulating, calling it “derivative Aussie horror” and “banal horror tropes” wrapped in nice cinematography. It’s not incompetent—far from it. It’s just deeply, fundamentally unremarkable. The direction is competent, the performances strong, the camerawork elegant… and the whole thing slides out of your brain the second the credits roll.
Final Verdict: Run, Rabbit, Run… Straight into the Middle of the Pack
So where does that leave Run Rabbit Run? Squarely in the “fine, I guess” tier of Netflix horror. Not bad enough to be fun, not bold enough to be memorable. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a moody Instagram filter slapped over a story you’ve heard a dozen times. Sarah Snook and Lily LaTorre bring all the intensity they can; the movie responds by shrugging and handing them a stack of tropes.
If you’re a horror newcomer, you might find it mildly unsettling. If you’ve watched even a handful of recent psychological chillers, you’ll spend most of the runtime mentally playing spot-the-influence and wondering when the film will stop nibbling at its own themes and actually take a bite. Spoiler: it never does. In the end, the only thing truly frightening about Run Rabbit Run is how close it comes to being good, then just sits there, staring at you like a rabbit in the headlights—beautifully lit, utterly frozen, and going nowhere.
