‘Run Rabbit Run’ Review: No Child of Mine

Buried trauma and resurrected guilt get fairly the exercise in Daina Reid’s “Run Rabbit Run,” a daft Australian psychodrama that forces the fabulous Sarah Snook to work together with a creepy bunny.

Snook performs Sarah, a fertility physician with a small daughter, Mia (a exceptional Lily LaTorre), and a genial ex-husband, Pete (Damon Herriman). From the beginning, Sarah seems fraught, coping poorly with the latest demise of her father. When Pete confides that he and his new spouse are planning to have a baby, Sarah’s misery solely will increase: There is a motive she doesn’t need Mia to have a sibling.

While we await that to be revealed, we watch Mia rework right into a stranger and Sarah photogenically disintegrate. Demanding to go to the grandmother she has by no means met, Mia begins experiencing tantrums and panic assaults, mysterious bruising and nosebleeds. Rather than seek the advice of a physician, Sarah accedes to the kid’s needs, with predictably disastrous outcomes. In motion pictures like this, rational grownup habits is counter to necessities; as an alternative, we have now a lolloping white rabbit, which materializes on Sarah’s porch and violently resists expulsion.

Gloomy and obscure, “Run Rabbit Run” is a moody, noncommittal tease replete with the same old spectral signifiers: clammy goals, scary drawings, unsettling masks. Snook does every part however rend her clothes in a efficiency that solely emphasizes the busy vapidity of Hannah Kent’s script. At occasions, although — when Bonnie Elliott’s uneasy digicam creeps right into a dank shed stuffed with ugly instruments, crawls by way of a forbidding tunnel of twisted vines, or flinches from a surprising incident with scissors — a extra important, extra incisive film peeks out. At the very least, I’d prefer to have realized extra about that darned bunny.

Run Rabbit Run
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix.