Sarah Snook continues a succession of excellent female lead performances in the opening stages of Sundance 2023 as a mother unravelling in the face of her child’s bizarre behaviour. Unfortunately, the rest of Daina Reid‘s motherhood horror Run Rabbit Run can’t match her standards. This narratively stilted and predictable affair wilts in the shadow of other recent Australian genre films that deal with similar themes, such as Relic and the high watermark of The Babadook.

Sarah (Snook) is a fertility doctor who splits the parenting of her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) with ex-husband Peter (Damon Herrimon), with whom she retains an amicable relationship. On Mia’s seventh birthday, Sarah finds a white rabbit outside her front door. Sarah allows Mia to keep the bunny, which coincides with the girl beginning to demonstrate some odd behaviour. In particular, she claims to miss Joan (Greta Scacchi), her grandmother, from whom Sarah is estranged and Mia has never met. She also begins to insist on being called Alice, which forced Sarah to start facing the demons of her past.

It’s becoming almost a trope in itself for modern horror to revolve around trauma and grief and, unlike another film in the Midnight thread at Sundance this year, the ferocious Birth/Rebirth, Run Rabbit Run sinks into forgettable territory. This is even before one takes into account its reliance on other spectacularly careworn tropes, such as repeated reveals of a phantom girl stood behind the protagonist, a family member’s room left untouched after their death, and even the old, ‘child has been drawing disturbing pictures at school’ chestnut. Not only this, but it fails to make the most of the assets it does have. Snook is great with some slim material, but is forced to carry too much of the film. And not enough is made of the spectacular Australian landscape, which is an open goal to emphasise Sarah’s increasing isolation. Yet the look of the film is as muted and washed out as the writing, as if buying into the tiresome idea of ‘elevated horror’ and its tendency to assume no-one will ever take a  horror film seriously if it contains a splash of colour.

The frustrating part is there are some moments that hint a wilder, more interesting film, particularly when Sarah’s past and present begin to meld together in disorientating ways, instilling an uncertainty and tension the rest of the film lacks. The editing of Nick Meyers and Sean Lahiff is especially effective in these scenes, such as Sarah literally wrestling with her past in a deathtrap of a shed that could feasibly belong to Mick Taylor, and a frantic, hallucinatory tussle with a terrified Mia as Sarah goes full Struwwelpeter with a pair of scissors. Special mention to for Lily LaTorre who gives an impressively shifting, unsettling performance.

Unfortunately, these moments are ultimately too few and far between. The rest of Run Rabbit Run is too oddly-paced and never generates a fully-realised atmosphere of dread, which makes its more generic elements more glaring. It’s a shame given the individual moments that demonstrate some talented hands on the tiller. Sarah Snook is good enough – as is Lily LaTorre – for it not to be an outright disappointment, but it fails to commit to the weirdness its repeated Alice in Wonderland references would suggest, and many other films have handled its familiar elements far better.

Screening as part of Sundance Festival 2023