Sarah Snook stars in new thriller Run Rabbit Run, but young co-star Lily LaTorre steals the show
The Succession actress delivers a strong performance in Run Rabbit Run. But it’s nine-year-old Lily LaTorre who is the standout.
Run Rabbit Run (M)
Netflix
★★★
The Australian movie Run Rabbit Run, starring Sarah Snook, is a slow burn psychological thriller. It’s clear from the outset that a malevolent force is present. The question is who or what it is.
It might be Sarah (Snook), a single mother who seems to have a lot of medication in the bathroom cabinet. Or perhaps it’s her seven-year-old daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre), who does look a bit like the twin sisters in The Shining.
Then there’s the white rabbit that lurks in their lives. Mia finds the stray and adopts it. When her mother, who is a doctor, sneaks out at night to shoo it out of its makeshift hutch, it savages her hand. The wound does not seem to heal.
Mia, upset with her mother’s bid to banish the buck-toothed beast, starts wearing a rabbit mask. Sarah’s longstanding nickname for her daughter, Bunny, now sounds a little odd.
Not as odd, though, as the changes in Mia’s behaviour. Or at least as seen through Sarah’s eyes.
Mia insists on seeing Joan, the maternal grandmother she has not met. When they do meet, at a nursing home, Joan (Greta Scacchi) calls her Alice.
Mia decides that Alice is her real name. “I miss her,’’ she tells her mother. “Who,’’ her mother asks. “My mummy.” The unblinking rabbit looks on.
Sarah’s father is dead and she keeps boxes of his belongings in the garage. At one point she wraps herself in one of his shirts and says, over and over, “You’re a good girl”. Earlier, her ex-husband (Damon Herriman) says to her, “I hope you tell me if you’re ever not good”.
Old photographs suggest Sarah had a sister. These family connections slowly come together in a chilling way, especially when Sarah, Mia and the rabbit decide to spend a few days in Sarah’s childhood home, which is suitably remote, old and creepy. It’s here that the title, Run Rabbit Run, shifts in meaning.
This 100-minute movie, filmed in Victoria and South Australia, is directed by Australian actor-turned-filmmaker Daina Reid, who started out on the 1990s TV comedy Full Frontal (as did Eric Bana). In 2019 she was Emmy nominated for directing episodes of the TV series A Handmaid’s Tale. Run Rabbit Run is written by Australian novelist Hannah Kent (Burial Rites, The Good People, Devotion).
Snook, fresh from her turn in the hit TV series Succession, is strong in the lead role. Though, as with the other film I review this week, The New Boy, it’s the young actor, nine-year-old LaTorre, who delivers the standout performance.
This is an well-made thriller about ghosts – of the past and present – that keeps one guessing until the end, and perhaps even afterwards.
The New Boy (M)
In cinemas from July 6
★★★★★
When I see a great film, I ask myself: does it deserve the full five stars? Usually I decide not. Today, however, the answer is easy. The New Boy, written, directed and filmed by Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, is a masterpiece.
Why? Let’s start with Thornton’s cinematography. From the opening sequence that shows a boy running from a boomerang in flight, we are immersed, body and soul, in another time and place: remote Australia in the wartime 1940s.
We’re not just watching it. We’re there. The film that came to mind as I inhabited this hard, beautiful landscape was Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011), which was filmed by Emmanuel Lubezki, who should have won an Oscar for it and soon went on to win three in a row, for Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant.
The story is simple on the surface but complex underneath. A nameless nine-year-old Indigenous boy is sent to a Catholic monastery. The “little darkie”, as the delivery man calls him, is handed over in a sack like something unwanted.
The monastery is run by a priest who we do not see. His absence is not explained. This is a movie that asks questions without expecting us to work out the answer or delivering one itself. Personally I like that.
There are two nuns who look after a group of Indigenous boys, converting them to Christianity and preparing them for jobs on the land.
Sister Eileen (dual Oscar winner Cate Blanchett) is a bit of a rule breaker. Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) is her offsider. She tells the new arrival that all the boys call her Sister Mum “because they don’t have mums”.
The relationship between the nuns and the “lost souls” is not one of Bible and strap. The love between them is clear. Blanchett is incredible, as ever, her movie star aura hidden in a habit, and Mailman adds humour, such as when she shows the new boy how to use a toilet.
There’s a jack-of-all-trades named George (Wayne Blair). When the new boy, who rarely speaks, reveals his background, George nods. “You’re a long way from home.”
And that brings us to the shining star of this movie: 11-year-old newcomer Aswan Reid. He is in almost every frame. He acts with natural physicality. His short life – and a perhaps a glimmer of his life to come – is in his eyes. Words are secondary. I thought of David Gulpilil, who was 16 when Nicolas Roeg cast him in Walkabout (1971).
It soon becomes obvious the new boy is an unusual child. He appears able to start small fires by flicking his fingers. He seems to bring an animal – a snake – back from the dead. The music, by Australian rock stars Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, underscores this sense of otherworldliness.
When Sister Eileen takes another delivery, of a life-sized statue of the crucified Jesus, the boy is fascinated by it. He watches as the nun inserts the nails in Jesus’s hands and crown of thorns on his head. Soon after, the boy’s palms bleed.
The nun becomes almost beholden to the boy. This takes us to the overwhelming question of this 116-minute movie: is the boy a Jesus figure? Or is he merely imitating what he has seen and been told and sacrificing his own culture in doing so?
Viewers will have their own opinions. As I watched the boy go from the chaff bag he came in to some sort of sacredness, real or imagined, I thought of the Jesus trilogy of novels by our adopted Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee.
Thornton was born and grew up in Alice Springs. This is his third feature, following Samson & Delilah (2009), which won an award at Cannes, and Sweet Country (2017).
The New Boy, set a quarter of a century before the constitutional recognition of Indigenous people, is timely ahead of the Voice referendum.
Yet this film is more than that. It stands on its own as a dazzling work of Australian art that should be in contention at the 2024 Oscars.
