Netflix’s Run Rabbit Run is everything a psychological thriller should be

Haunted kids and horror films are a great combination. Netflix’s new movie Run Rabbit RunThis is the perfect example.

It is a psychological thriller that treads the fine line between horror, Run Rabbit Run The stars Succession’s Sarah Snook as a fertility doctor named Sarah. Sarah’s still carrying quite a bit of grief over the passing of her mother when her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) starts acting extremely strange. More specifically, Mia refers to herself as “Alice,” and claims that she wants to “see her mom.” As it turns out, Alice is the name of Sarah’s sister, who disappeared at about Mia’s age, and Sarah never told Mia about. The strangeness and horror only increases from that point.

Mia, who is playing Alice in the film, disappears as she knows things only Alice could. As life unravels, Sarah is forced to look deeper into her own past and confront her repressed memories and grief over Alice’s disappearance. Here’s where Run Rabbit RunThis film is a real gem, particularly when compared with other horror films that have explored trauma in recent years.

Since the beginning of horror movies, trauma has been used as a metaphor for emotional distress. The Babadook’s release in 2014, the effectiveness of writers and directors drawing that connection has been hit or miss. Movies like Then What?, MidsommarIf you want to know more about. M3GANThey are able to convey their ideas without losing themselves in the analogies. Some, such as Smile, The Boogeyman” CandymanTake a heavy hand with their horror plots. They often forget about the actual scares and their own story to fit their allegories.

Run Rabbit Run avoids the messiness of metaphor entirely by making the trauma the actual text: Mia morphs from the source of Sarah’s worry as a parent into the source of her grief as a sister. By diving headlong into the protagonist’s trauma instead of talking around it, director Daina Reid (Apple TV’s Shining Girls) is able to play around with more surreal images and warping realities, twisting Sarah’s world and distorting it through the lens of her pain, grief, and maybe even some repressed memories. It’s a powerful and often disturbing combination that gives the movie a creepy atmosphere and some of its most effective and terrifying moments.

The movie’s directness can’t quite mitigate all the problems that plague the recent wave of trauma-tinged horror films Most specifically, the ending feels a little too tidy compared to the movie that preceded it, especially as it loses some of the surreal images that make the rest of the final act so harrowing in favor of a too-clean scene that easily fades from memory. Even if the movie doesn’t quite stick to its landing, Run Rabbit RunThis is easily the best of Netflix’s horror releases.

Run Rabbit Run Netflix now offers the movie.