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Run Rabbit Run

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Run Rabbit Run boasts some powerhouse performances, but they're largely overwhelmed by a thin plot and overreliance on stale horror tropes.

Sarah Snook is the main reason to see Run Rabbit Run -- if you're in the mood for a really slow, unoriginal, and somewhat confusing movie, that is.

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The topic of motherhood has long provided the horror genre with some of its greatest stories. From “ Rosemary’s Baby ” to “ The Babadook ,” there is something inherently scary about watching your beloved child be overtaken by evil forces or reckoning with the idea that becoming a parent makes us vulnerable to just about every terrible thing in our world (and beyond). In Daina Reid ’s new film “Run Rabbit Run,” fertility doctor Sarah ( Sarah Snook ) meets these tensions head-on when her precocious seven-year-old daughter Mia ( Lily LaTorre ) begins to claim she’s actually Alice, Sarah’s sister who disappeared when she was Mia’s age. 

Reid’s ghost story uses innocuous objects to emphasize the film’s sense of unease. First, Mia shows up with a white fluffy rabbit and quickly becomes obsessed with it, to the point where she begins wearing a self-made pink rabbit mask. The bunny, which she names Rabbit, ominously hops around the house, a harbinger of the bad things still to come. When Sarah tries to get rid of Rabbit, it bites her, the first of many injuries she will incur as she spirals over memories of her missing sister, her estranged mother, and her recently departed father. The film’s conflict is centered between mother Sarah, and daughter Mia, but it also includes a thorny relationship with Sarah’s mother, Joan ( Greta Scacchi ), creating a cycle of guilt from childhood sins and feeling like she’s not doing enough for her kid. 

Rabbit is not the only troubling thing in Hannah Kent ’s script. In setting up Sarah’s narrative, Kent shows the audience how much Sarah’s been pushed to the brink even before anything unexplained begins. She’s divorced and co-parenting with her ex-husband, Pete ( Damon Herriman ), who has moved on and is starting a new family of his own. Sarah is also dealing with the death of her dad, his things are still piled up in her garage, still to be sorted through. And then there’s her mother, an ominous figure also losing her memories to dementia. When Mia’s problems escalate, she first tries to be the strong parent doing what’s right for her child, but then, she starts to hurt herself in the process and by extension, hurts Mia. 

In a marvelous departure from her best-known role as Shiv Roy in “Succession,” Snook brings her character a motherly sense of care and duty. She’s attentive and affectionate in ways many of us haven’t seen her. Her calm, collected demeanor quickly erodes in the face of uncertainty and stress. Snook’s attention and care for LaTorre’s Mia are deeply felt, and their bond is evident from the first scene when the mother wakes up her daughter with a birthday gift. LaTorre looks at Snook with large expressive eyes that shift from confused and scared when she’s inexplicably bleeding to burning with rage when she screams that she’s actually Alice. But in moments of Mia’s clarity, LaTorre runs to Snook and embraces her tightly for safety, establishing the close relationship between the pair early on, giving us a sense of what will be lost once Rabbit enters the frame.  

Sarah’s descent into madness mirrors the haunting landscape of the film’s setting in Waikerie, Australia.  There ate windswept horizons, imposing cliffs, stormy clouds over luscious green hills, flutters of birds flying in droves by her old home, and what looks like trees sprouting out of a purple river. The film wallows in a weatherbeaten palette, with lots of pale yellows and dusty grays in the daytime. At night, darkness takes over, and even well-lit homes and cozy bedrooms start to feel unsafe. Cinematographer Bonnie Elliot carefully plays with these moods to create a visual sense of Sarah’s spiral. The film’s aesthetic becomes increasingly erratic as she loses her grip on reality. When Sarah goes in and out of a dreamlike state, images may look hazy or disorienting in their closeup, then harshly come into focus when she returns to reality. When Sarah starts to lose control, Snook physically takes her character to that dark place, but the film’s camera immerses the viewer in her unease. 

Motherhood, like extreme moments of grief, can be among the most life-changing experiences—a clear demarcation of life before and after the event. Sometimes, it can also be coupled with extreme feelings of isolation, which in this horror movie, makes a person vulnerable to the ghosts of their past. “Run Rabbit Run” is a solid, spooky tale without anything too flashy like a Babadook to haunt our dreams and memes but chilling enough to make us sit up in our chairs and scan the screen for the next sign of danger. While a fluffy white rabbit may symbolize innocence, it leads Sarah down a nightmarish version of “ Alice in Wonderland .” The mothers in this film are haunted by the mistakes they made. Joan never seemed to have recovered from Alice’s disappearance, and Sarah’s barely buried trauma resurfaces her own feelings of regret over failing her daughter. And once Sarah is through the looking glass, are she and Mia safe? Are any of us?

On Netflix now.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to  RogerEbert.com .

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Film Credits

Run Rabbit Run (2023)

100 minutes

Sarah Snook as Sarah

Greta Scacchi as Joan

Damon Herriman as Pete

Julia Davis as Gail

Trevor Jamieson as Sandy

Georgina Naidu as Andrea

Shabana Azeez as Nowa

Lily LaTorre as Mia

• Hannah Kent

Cinematographer

• Bonnie Elliott
• Nick Meyers
• Mark Bradshaw
• Marcus Whale

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Is run rabbit run really that bad 6 reasons the horror movie's rotten tomatoes score is so low.

Run Rabbit Run was the #1 movie on Netflix this week, but is the Sarah Snook-led Australian horror movie really as bad as its negative reviews claim?

WARNING! Contains SPOILERS for Run Rabbit Run. Although Run Rabbit Run is a streaming success on Netflix, its bad reviews, low Rotten Tomatoes score, and audience feedback paint another picture entirely. The Australian horror movie follows the intriguing story of Sarah (played by Succession 's Sarah Snook), a fertility doctor whose young daughter mysteriously claims to be the woman's long-lost sister. Throughout its first week of release, Run Rabbit Run was frequently Netflix’s #1 movie, implying that it was a big hit with subscribers.

Run Rabbit Run did not fare well when it came to reviews, however, and even the reception from general Netflix viewers has been negative. The movie has a 38% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and only a 26% audience score. Run Rabbit Run ’s ending and the slow-burn tone of the movie have been the main targets of criticism, although some defenders note that it is at least anchored by a superb performance from Snook.

6 Run Rabbit Run’s Ambiguous Horror Is Divisive

For audiences expecting a straightforward horror movie, Run Rabbit Run ’s atmospheric chills could reasonably be called slow, confusing, and dull. Run Rabbit Run ’s approach to horror isn’t inherently flawed, per se, but this style of horror is not for everyone. Run Rabbit Run ’s meditations on motherhood weren’t necessarily what viewers expected from a movie classified by Netflix as horror, and the fact that it doesn't explain its vague symbolism doesn’t help its case. While Run Rabbit Run ’s stunning filming locations made great use of its Australian setting, its creative debt to hallucinatory Australian genre fare like Walkabout and Wake in Fright wasn’t universally appreciated by audiences.

Run Rabbit Run ’s offbeat approach to horror might have resonated with a smaller audience, but its unexpected popularity on Netflix could have worked against the movie’s reception. Viewers who weren't expecting a slow-moving and deliberately obtuse character study may not have enjoyed Run Rabbit Run ’s strange, discordant story. While Sarah's plot is compelling, her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre) never feels all that human, and her dementia-stricken mother, Joan (Greta Scacci), is hardly a presence in the movie. As such, Run Rabbit Run left viewers with few characters to connect with — particularly after the revelations of its downbeat coda.

5 Run Rabbit Run Is Undeniably Derivative

Speaking of Run Rabbit Run ’s creative inspirations, not all the things the movie borrowed were particularly subtle. Critics weren’t wrong to complain that Run Rabbit Run , the umpteenth elevated horror movie about motherhood, owed a lot to The Babadook , Hereditary , Relic , Nanny , Baby Ruby , Umma , and other recent generational trauma horror movies. Just as Antebellum and Them were accused of borrowing too liberally from Jordan Peele’s style of socially conscious horror, Run Rabbit Run ’s reliance on creepy children and the inherent fear of parenthood felt played out for viewers who had seen innumerable spins on this theme in recent years. The current overuse of these tropes has lessened their impact.

In particular, the fact that The Babadook ’s dark ending is so similar to Run Rabbit Run ’s conclusion didn’t help. In both movies, a troubled mother suffers a mental breakdown that is realized via haunting hallucinations, only to eventually come to terms with a traumatic death in her past that shaped her subsequent family life. However, while The Babadook ’s creepy conclusion offers viewers definitive catharsis, Run Rabbit Run ’s ending is both too similar and nowhere near as satisfying. It is not clear what is happening to Sarah and Mia in Run Rabbit Run ’s ending, making the inevitable comparisons to The Babadook feel unfortunately imbalanced in favor of the earlier movie.

4 Run Rabbit Run’s Marketing Didn’t Help

The trailer for Run Rabbit Run makes the movie look more like a straightforward horror film than a meditation on grief, which could be understandably frustrating. While Run Rabbit Run is hardly as impenetrable as 2008’s The Headless Woma n or even 2019’s comparatively accessible La Llorona , neither of those art-horror movies was sold as mainstream genre fare. In contrast, Run Rabbit Ru n’s misleading trailer promised a more clear-cut story that didn’t represent the movie’s slow, inconclusive study of a mother’s crumbling psyche. It didn’t help that when viewed as a simple horror movie, Run Rabbit Run wasn’t particularly innovative or impressive — nor is it particularly unsettling or scary.

3 Run Rabbit Run’s Big Twist Is Predictable

When Sarah becomes terrified of her daughter claiming to be her “missing” sister, Alice, it doesn’t take a genius to guess that Sarah harbors guilt over secretly killing this sibling. When Run Rabbit Run ’s Joan reveals Alice was Sarah’s sister, it is only a matter of time before viewers learn that Sarah’s fear of her child stems from her long-buried guilt. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Run Rabbit Ru n could have played with Sarah’s guilt throughout the movie, much like The Babadook addressed the threat of its heroine killing her child early on. However, by hiding this twist until the ending, Run Rabbit Run made its story less compelling.

2 Run Rabbit Runs Ending Frustrated Viewers

Run Rabbit Run ’s ending fit the themes of the movie, as viewers were left unsure whether Sarah imagined her daughter running away with her sister’s ghost. However, it is not clear exactly what’s happening in the final scenes, and, viewers who wanted Run Rabbit Run to be a fun horror movie could reasonably emerge annoyed by this. Run Rabbit Run doesn’t depict anything as definitive as Alice’s ghost getting revenge on Sarah, and it is entirely possible that Sarah is merely imagining Mia walking away with the ghost. As such, viewers have no way of knowing what happens in Run Rabbit Run ’s ending. Unlike The Babadook , there’s no clarity.

1 Run Rabbit Run Has A Great Performance (But Little Else)

While Run Rabbit Run ’s cast is strong, Sarah Snook’s barnstorming central turn is a standout that ensures the film is worth watching. Snook is fantastic as the conflicted Sarah, as the actor manages to capture the fear her character has over losing Mia, the guilt she carries over Alice’s death, and the anger underpinning her decades of hiding from the truth. However, one great performance isn’t enough to carry a movie that never quite decides whether it is a dark domestic drama, an outright horror, or something else entirely. This means even though Run Rabbit Run is good enough to keep viewers watching, its chilly reception isn’t surprising.

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‘Run Rabbit Run’ Review: No Child of Mine

A splendid Sarah Snook battles weak plotting in this atmospheric, derivative ghost story.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Buried trauma and resurrected guilt get quite the workout in Daina Reid’s “Run Rabbit Run,” a ludicrous Australian psychodrama that forces the fabulous Sarah Snook to interact with a creepy bunny.

Snook plays Sarah, a fertility doctor with a small daughter, Mia (a remarkable Lily LaTorre), and a genial ex-husband, Pete (Damon Herriman). From the start, Sarah appears fraught, coping poorly with the recent death of her father. When Pete confides that he and his new wife are planning to have a child, Sarah’s distress only increases: There is a reason she doesn’t want Mia to have a sibling.

While we wait for that to be revealed, we watch Mia transform into a stranger and Sarah photogenically fall apart. Demanding to visit the grandmother she has never met, Mia begins experiencing tantrums and panic attacks, mysterious bruising and nosebleeds. Rather than consult a doctor, Sarah accedes to the child’s wishes, with predictably disastrous results. In movies like this, rational adult behavior is counter to requirements; instead, we have a lolloping white rabbit, which materializes on Sarah’s porch and violently resists expulsion.

Gloomy and vague, “Run Rabbit Run” is a moody, noncommittal tease replete with the usual spectral signifiers: clammy dreams, scary drawings, unsettling masks. Snook does everything but rend her garments in a performance that only emphasizes the busy vapidity of Hannah Kent’s script. At times, though — when Bonnie Elliott’s uneasy camera creeps into a dank shed filled with gruesome tools, crawls through a forbidding tunnel of twisted vines, or flinches from a shocking incident with scissors — a more vital, more incisive movie peeks out. At the very least, I’d like to have learned more about that darned bunny.

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

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Netflix’s new thriller Run Rabbit Run lets Sarah Snook confront trauma head on

The Succession star finds out being a mom isn’t easy

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Share All sharing options for: Netflix’s new thriller Run Rabbit Run lets Sarah Snook confront trauma head on

Few things go together better than horror movies and haunted kids. Netflix’s new movie Run Rabbit Run is a perfect example.

Carefully treading the line between horror and psychological thriller, Run Rabbit Run 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. Things only get weirder and creepier from there.

As the movie goes on, Mia disappears into her persona of Alice, knowing things that only Alice would. As life unravels, Sarah is forced to look deeper into her own past and confront her repressed memories and grief over Alice’s disappearance. This is where Run Rabbit Run really shines, especially compared to some of the other recent horror movies that delve into trauma .

While trauma metaphors have dominated the horror movie genre since The Babadook ’s release in 2014, the effectiveness of writers and directors drawing that connection has been hit or miss. Movies like It Follows , Midsommar , or M3GAN manage to nail their themes without getting too lost in their analogies. Others, like Smile , The Boogeyman , and Candyman , take too heavy a hand in their trauma plots, often losing sight of the scares or even their own story in service of their allegories and themes.

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. But even without completely sticking the landing, Run Rabbit Run is still among the most interesting Netflix releases of the year so far, and easily one of its better horror options .

Run Rabbit Run is now streaming on Netflix.

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‘Run Rabbit Run’ Review: Even a Feral Sarah Snook Can’t Raise Hairs in This Aussie Thriller

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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A predictably terrific Sarah Snook goes full-blown feral in the Australian horror movie “Run Rabbit Run,” but its final-act destination isn’t enough to justify the journey.

You might enjoy this thriller if you’ve never seen one. Directed by Daina Reid from a screenplay by Hannah Kent, “Run Rabbit Run” largely tears from the playbook of similar recent horror titles about mothers wracked by grief and trauma who are staring down supernatural events that confront them with their strained relationships with their own mothers and children (see “Relic,” which this film’s producers also helmed, and “The Babadook,” for two of the most obvious and contemporary reference points). But the screenplay has so many dizzying leaps in logic and never quite establishes the world it purports to build — are the onscreen happenings supernatural, or merely Grand Guignol freakout hallucination? Either possibility turns out to be disappointing.

Sarah Snook, trading in her Shiv Roy “Succession” old-money aesthetic for linen Banana Republic Outback chic, unbuttons as never before here as a fertility doctor also named Sarah. She lives in a South Australian suburb with her small daughter, Mia (Lily Latorre), who’s just turned seven. But her birthday has eerily coincided with the very recent death of Sarah’s own father, a tragedy she hasn’t really faced up to. Sarah’s also divorced and all but estranged from her mother Joan (Greta Scacchi), recently diagnosed with dementia and living in a nursing home.

As is the lot for such films, ominous animal symbols abound, most explicitly taking the form of a white rabbit that appears on Sarah’s doorstep on Mia’s birthday. The child is instantly enamored with the fluffy, menacing creature, and almost immediately starts showing signs of erratic agitation, poking Sarah with questions about Joan, with whom neither has much of a relationship. Mia also begins to call herself “Alice,” insisting she’s no longer herself, and eagle-eyed viewers will have figured out who Alice is quickly into the movie.

Another creature takes on insidious allegorical power, as in one scene, Sarah runs over a large bird, barely noticed it herself until Mia calls attention to the accident, and then can’t seem to find the bird beneath the car. These images are less cliched (and become more instructive later) than what inevitably becomes the dominating visual motif of Sarah and Mia’s breakdowns — which is, you guessed it, creepy scratch drawings of stick figures with eyes and limbs clawed off made by Mia at school. Sarah pores over them late into the night, worrying over a large glass of wine and dialing up her ex and his new wife, accusing them of poisoning Mia’s mind by spilling secrets of Sarah’s past.

Those secrets coalesce into a shaky schematic silhouette of a picture in the movie’s second half, where Sarah inexplicably drags Mia to her childhood home in rural Waikerie. How that makes sense as a means to quelling looming, unquenchable dread, well, that’s just one of the movie’s many lazy screenwriting detours left unexplained. Joan, who after a family visit to the nursing home now calls Mia “Alice” too, has left the place uncannily intact from when Sarah was a kid. So what better to do than relive traumas from the past to hopefully extinguish the new ones?

Mia, in a preternaturally impressive performance by the young Latorre, has grown ferociously willful toward her mother, hurling barbs at Sarah, calling her a “terrible person,” and subjecting her to outbursts that would test even the most patient mother’s temperament. Here’s where memories of “The Babadook” creep in, as in fellow Aussie Jennifer Kent’s film, we felt a stinging sympathy for its lead’s increasing ambivalence toward motherhood as her child became, well, really freaking annoying.

Snook and Latorre operate on a similar plane here, as Sarah starts to really flip, and we wonder if what she’s seeing is real or imagined or some supernatural machination. Plenty of jump scares featuring a glowering girl with long black hair in a tatty nightgown, just out of focus in the background, or flashes of blood-slathered hands or nightmares that culminate in over-the-top crashing sound design deliver “gotcha” moments. But they’re just that, with little substance.

There are a few startling images in the movie’s back half that suggest a different movie entirely, and one horror fans would like to go to. A sinisterly derelict shed on the Waikerie contains a locked cupboard you don’t want to go near. Inside the shed, suspended from the ceiling, hang rusted tools that resemble torture devices. There’s another moment involving Sarah and Mia and a pair of scissors where you can almost hear the wave of shock and perhaps even frothiness cascade across the audience: Is this suddenly the movie we’re about to get? Unfortunately not.

Ultimately, “Run Rabbit Run” is a pile-up of banal horror tropes. Director of photography Bonnie Elliott conjures some sweepingly foreboding images of the Australian landscape, even when working with a drone camera, but there’s something sleepy about the whole affair. The saving grace that makes “Rabbit” maybe worth seeing is an unkempt Sarah Snook, who goes into full, well, “Babadook” and “Black Swan” and even “Repulsion” territory in the movie’s final throwdown. But that these are reference points at all suggests the movie’s mundanity and missing original pieces. It’s the sort of thriller you’d scroll past on Netflix , maybe even drift off to, and now, very soon, you can.

“Run Rabbit Run” premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. It was acquired by Netflix out of the festival for release at a later date.

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Run Rabbit Run

Sarah Snook plays a fertility doctor who believes firmly in life and death, but after noticing the strange behavior of her young daughter, she must challenge her own values and confront a gh... Read all Sarah Snook plays a fertility doctor who believes firmly in life and death, but after noticing the strange behavior of her young daughter, she must challenge her own values and confront a ghost from her past. Sarah Snook plays a fertility doctor who believes firmly in life and death, but after noticing the strange behavior of her young daughter, she must challenge her own values and confront a ghost from her past.

• Hannah Kent
• Sarah Snook
• Lily LaTorre
• Neil Melville
• 160 User reviews
• 86 Critic reviews
• 52 Metascore
• 1 win & 2 nominations

• Gail (Nightshift Nurse)
• Young Sarah
• Little Sarah
• Little Alice
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Sarah Snook replaced Elisabeth Moss in the lead role. The latter was originally cast but had to pull out to due to scheduling conflicts so Snook was cast instead.
• Soundtracks Cello Chi for Cello and Voice Composed and Performed by Sarah Hopkins By kind permission of Sarah Hopkins

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• Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Run Rabbit Run’ on Netflix, in Which Sarah Snook is Stuck Among a Litany of Creepy-Kid Horror Cliches

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Sarah snook recalls brian cox flying into a “rage” on ‘succession’ set: “his voice can be very terrifying”, ‘succession’s sarah snook calls herself “too young and naive” to stand up against producer who rudely criticized her for eating cake, sarah snook admits she felt “so sad for shiv” during that major ‘succession’ finale twist: “are you f—king kidding me”.

Run Rabbit Run (now on Netflix) might not get much traction without its headliner: Emmy-nominated Succession star Sarah Snook, who anchors this psych-horror outing directed by another Emmy nominee, Daina Reid (who garnered that acclaim for helming episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale ). This Australian film dabbles in trauma, mental illness and apparent supernatural possession, while the animal in the title looks on ominously, wiggling its cute widdle pink nosey-wosey as ominous drones WBRRRMMMMM on the soundtrack. You may be deep-sighing at such cliches, but the question here is whether Snook’s actorly skill can overcome the film’s familiarities.

RUN RABBIT RUN : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Sarah (Snook) is a mother, daughter, sister and ex-wife who seems to be the subject of torment on all four of those fronts. Then again, who’s the common denominator here? Right. Not pointing any fingers, but, you know, where there’s smoke and all that. And there’s some crucial context: Sarah’s father recently died, and all signs say they were very close. It’s her daughter Mia’s (Lily LaTorre) seventh birthday, and her dad Pete (Damon Herriman) is bringing his wife and stepson over for cake and ice cream. Mia and the boy enjoy each other’s company, and Sarah and Pete are in a congenial and warm place, although it’s still a bit awkward, as you’d expect. Two things happen on this day that arouse curiosity: The first is the arrival of a cute white rabbit on the premises, and it’s timid enough that Mia scoops it up and of course wants to keep it. The second is, Mia’s little stepbrother bonks her on the head, which seems like the usual little-kid shenanigans, but in retrospect, may have repercussions of a more SINISTER nature. Or not! Who knows!

That night after company has left and Mia’s in bed, Sarah steps out to sneak a secret cigarette and burn the birthday card from Grandma Joan. That’s Sarah’s mother. She thinks she’s getting rid of something by doing that, but we all know she’s just adding another item to the baggage strapped to her back. Then she tries to drop the rabbit over the fence, but it squeals and bites her and leaves a nasty oozing wound and instead of being kept in a makeshift pen it’s now free to wander untethered throughout the house, prompting the synthesizer operator to lean very heavily on the keys, and also probably shitting wherever it pleases. Most people would give the little biter less freedom instead of more, but never mind, and besides, the movie has to keep going back to it for Moments of Ominous Portent. 

Enough with the rabbit, who doesn’t have a name but I’m tempted to dub Red Herring; let’s move on. Now, about that bonk on the head. The next day, Mia insists upon visiting Grandma Joan. She’s never met her, but she really really wants to visit Grandma Joan. Grandma Joan, Grandma Joan, Grandma Joan. Sarah isn’t sure why, and resists, and won’t tell Mia why she resists. Sarah’s long been estranged from her mother, and has been ignoring calls from a rest home, so maybe it’s time to rip the band-aid off. They make the long drive – complete with the Horror Movie Long Overhead Shot Of A Car Driving Down A Winding Country Road – to visit, where Sarah learns that Joan (Greta Scacchi) has dementia. She’d know that already if she’d answer her dang phone. Joan doesn’t recognize Sarah, but she immediately embraces Mia, except she calls her Alice. The old woman is sick and confused, obviously. Sarah has to drag Mia kicking and screaming to the car to leave, and from this point, Mia insists that she be called Alice. Who the hell is Alice? She’s Sarah’s dead sister, that’s who. Well, shit. Looks like we have a psycho-supernatural dilemma on our hands. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Run Rabbit Run boasts plenty of Hereditary and – maybe it’s the Australian factor – Babadook isms. And the Sinister Rabbit? It’s highly reminiscent of the Satan-o-bunny from The Witch and/or 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie . 

Performance Worth Watching: Snook clearly has the chops and screen presence to give a resonant portrayal of a deeply haunted mother/daughter/ex-wife/sister, and her performance is by far the most memorable element of Run Rabbit Run .

Memorable Dialogue: Mia-slash-Alice chills her mom to the bone when she explains why she so desperately wants to see the grandmother she’s never met: “I miss people I’ve never met all the time.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Snook is so good in Run Rabbit Run , it bums me out that she has to exist alongside a litany of tiresome and repetitive cliches from Creepy Little Kid Movies, including, but not limited to, the following vaguely occult problem-child behaviors:

• Wearing a crude, sinister, handmade mask
• Insisting she go by a dead person’s name
• Experiencing inexplicable nosebleeds and mysterious head wounds
• Drawing disturbing pictures
• Nurturing a psychic bond with an animal
• Saying/doing things that make the lights flicker

So clearly, Mia is possessed as f—. And by whom, you already know, although the movie really really hopes you don’t – or at least hopes you don’t figure out the circumstances culminating in the dramatic fallout we see here. (Note: You’ll figure it out.) Or maybe she’s not possessed as f—, and everything is Sarah’s delusion, because the film isn’t above shameless attempts at gaslighting us or its deeply troubled protagonist.

This isn’t to say the movie lacks substance. Sarah’s struggling to balance the mother/daughter/ex-wife/sister that everyone needs her to be, and Hannah Kent’s screenplay ruminates around in the Womanhood Of It All, specifically the pressures of her present and how she resists the past’s attempt to encroach upon the peace (that in reality isn’t peace at all) she’s found in the wake of deeply unhealthy psychological compartmentalization. Sarah is a frustrating character, and as much as we want to empathize with her, she insists upon pushing her demons into rooms and slamming the doors and leaning on them instead of just owning her shit – which might make for a more compelling and original movie, instead of this grab-bag of weary horror shibboleths that lead to a vaguely dissatisfying conclusion. To the film’s credit, Reid foregoes bloodshed for scary unseen things, directs with confidence and a strong cinematographic eye, and draws a muscular performance from Snook. But the material ends up tripping over too many tropes to be a deeper excursion into the psychology of childhood and motherhood. 

Our Call: Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the waaaaaabbbbbbbit. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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‘run rabbit run’ review: sarah snook in a maternal horror flick whose shivers are only skin-deep.

The 'Succession' star plays a mother whose relationship with her young daughter takes a turn for the fraught in Daina Reid's film.

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Jourdain Searles

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With the departure of its ceo, sundance now must chart a new course, sundance sets dates for 2025 fest, run rabbit run.

Moody and atmospheric, Run Rabbit Run easily builds tension and dread. And yet, it keeps hinting at depth that never comes. Director Daina Reid takes us through all the similar motions–hallucinations, mysterious injuries, bursts of violence in the most generic way possible. Even the symbolic white rabbit that appears throughout the film inspires neither interest nor dread.

But the most frustrating thing about Run Rabbit Run is its minimalist approach to presenting Sarah and her frustrations. We never get inside her head because the film is more interested in withholding from us than telling a full, compelling story. Scenes with family members that should fill out the narrative with rich backstory are repetitive and vague, providing no insight into why Sarah is so isolated and volatile in the first place. 

Sarah’s friends and family aren’t helpful, in part because she doesn’t have the language to tell them what’s going on. But there’s also an edge to Sarah, one that can’t easily be explained away by fatigue. Snook plays her as if she were a child trapped in an adult’s body — defensive, easily overwhelmed and prone to tantrums. Moments between mother and daughter quickly devolve into circular arguments. And yet, LaTorre shows promise as Mia, in a precocious performance in need of a better film. Writer Hannah Kent’s script is too minimalist to provide memorable lines of dialogue for the young actress.

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‘Run Rabbit Run' Review: Sarah Snook Faces Sinister Forces in By-the-Numbers ‘Babadook’ Imitation

Sarah Snook can't salvage this horror film that feels too derivative of stories we've seen done better before.

This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

There are a couple of moments in Run Rabbit Run , the Australian family horror starring Sarah Snook , where you’re left wondering about whether there is something missing from the film. Missing not in terms of the narrative, which is structurally competent in a derivative sense, but in terms of having an actual emotional investment in what is unfolding. While not without some arresting moments, the overall experience starts to wear rather thin as it spins its wheels in going through the motions of what other works that preceded it have done far better. The prevailing emptiness at its core soon becomes a weight from which it can’t ever escape as it drags itself from sequence to sequence about death that don't have any greater life to them. Though Snook gives an often disquieting performance as a mother who is unraveling when facing down her own past trauma, the rest of the surrounding film soon reveals itself to be a hollow imitation with very little to actually latch onto. It may find an audience on Netflix , which acquired it out of the Sundance Film Festival , but it still doesn’t leave much of an impression.

Directed by Daina Reid from a screenplay by Hannah Kent , the film places us in the initially happy though increasingly tenuous life of Snook’s Sarah. A mother who works as a fertility doctor, a profession which does the film no favors as it just invites comparisons to the far superior birth/rebirth that also showed at the festival, she is soon to celebrate the birthday of her daughter. Mia ( Lily Latorre ) has just turned seven and appears to be a completely ordinary little kid as she revels in the occasion. That will soon change when a rabbit shows up on their doorstep and the young girl soon starts wearing a mask resembling her new furry friend.

Sarah, carrying a lot of repressed sadness of her own, is clearly a little unnerved by this though isn’t quite sure what to do about it. However, when Mia begins calling herself by a different name from her mother’s past and acting quite differently than the kid we were first introduced to, it will become impossible to ignore what is going on. As Sarah is confronted with secrets that she had done everything that she could to bury to never have to think about them again, the life she built for herself and her daughter starts to crumble before her eyes.

RELATED: Sarah Snook Faces Ghosts From Her Past in First 'Run Rabbit Run' Trailer

This all sounds well and good in theory. In execution, the film never finds its footing. The animal imagery, both in the rabbit and birds that occasionally seem to haunt the film, invites the sense that there is something supernatural going on. Unfortunately, it is vaguely sketched and lacking in genuine scares. Rather than stand out, it just becomes part of the lackluster overall experience. The confines of the suburbs in which Sarah lives with the character formerly known as Mia start to become suffocating. As the single mother begins observing her daughter making unsettling drawings, which feel like they could have been lifted from any other film, she starts to grow paranoid that elements of her past have been found out. This setting is eventually abandoned when the two return to Sarah’s childhood home in an attempt to dial up the tension by tying the two timelines together. The entire experience feels eerily reminiscent of striking past Australian horror films such as The Babadook and the more recent Relic in how it tries to intertwine the petrifying elements with something more personal.

Where Run Rabbit Run falls short is that it lacks any uniqueness that it can call its own. There are few visual moments that stand out in the mind as the film increasingly toys with you by robbing the experience of any depth when it repeatedly calls into question whether what we are supposedly seeing even matters at all. If there is one saving grace, it would be in the performance of Snook. While most known to many for her role in the series Succession , she more than proves that she is capable of carrying a film all on her own. She shouldn't have had to, as the story lets her down at nearly every turn, but she really rises to the occasion.

The poise with which she initially carries herself as she goes through the routines of work and motherhood is juxtaposed with the way the darkness begins to creep in. While the rest of the film goes for the bare minimum of imitation, Snook feels like she is bringing out something far deeper and more primal. She is able to take the flimsy foundation that the film is operating on and reach for something more intriguing. In particular, several moments towards the end where Sarah becomes almost completely consumed by fear, and the darkness that surrounds her cuts through all the noise, are gripping. It is her distraught expression that stays etched in your mind.

In these sequences, all the ways that Snook shines just calls attention to how everything else is just less interesting by comparison. Even the best performances in the world can’t salvage a story that is without any defining cinematic identity of its own. Of course, just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it still can't do it well. Alas, that never comes to fruition in Run Rabbit Run. There are a couple of moments that prove to be genuinely alarming, including one that involves a pair of scissors that become a weapon, and seemed to hint at what could have been a different direction for the film to go towards. Instead, any moments of audaciousness are smothered by the standard story it seems hellbent on taking us down.

Cycling through various tropes where we begin to trust Sarah’s perspective less and less, the grasp at an emotional metaphor about trauma becomes cannibalistic in that it is a closed loop. It only ends up consuming itself and the characters in this pursuit, leaving little substance beyond its shallow ideas that never come together into anything meaningful. While Snook does all she can to give the experience some heft, Run Rabbit Run is a horror film in search of something greater others have already achieved that it is never able to find.

Run Rabbit Run is on Netflix starting June 28.

Run Rabbit Run Review: A Generic "Mother-Horror" Carried by Succession's Sarah Snook

Bolstered by Sarah Snook's powerhouse performance, Run Rabbit Run is a haunting yet cliched addition to the maternal horror sub-genre.

Horror movies that explore maternal themes, or as it's so plainly written, maternal horror, or the "mother-horror" subgenre is a very packed one in horror. Movies like The Babadook, Hereditary, Rosemary's Baby, and Goodnight Mommy are without a doubt the best to ever do it, and offer compelling dives into motherhood all while delivering some truly horrifying experiences.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, Run Rabbit Run is the latest film to tackle the "mother-horror" subgenre to varied effect. It's a haunting flick carried by powerful performances, however Run Rabbit Run perhaps leans into its genre tropes a little too much.

Directed by the fantastic Daina Reid, mostly known for her work on The Handmaid's Tale, Run Rabbit Run is still a spooky good time despite the clichés. Fans of the "mother-horror" subgenre will find plenty to enjoy about the Netflix Original flick, if they can look past the tropes and its lack of originality. It may lose some audiences during the movies second act, but Run Rabbit Run, does well to recapture audiences attention during it's final minutes.

"… Run Run Run"

Run Rabbit Run follows Sarah (Sarah Snook), a fertility doctor who begins noticing some strange behavior from her daughter, Mia (Lilly LaTorre). Sarah must challenge her own values and confront a ghost from her past in the process.

The film starts on a scene that should typically be a day of happiness and cheer; however, Mia's seventh birthday is depressingly grim. At this point, we don't know why, but Daina Reid fills the scene with heaps of paranoia. Soon, Sarah's ex-husband Pete (Damon Herriman) and his girlfriend Andrea (Georgina Naidu) come over to celebrate. Andrea's son begins hitting Mia, forcing Sarah to shout out the poor boy, in front of his parents. Immediately something seems off.

As the film progresses, Mia begins to act very strange. She begins asking to see Joan (Greta Scacchi), whom she's never met, and starts screaming at Sarah to call her Alice, who we learn about later on in the film. As the film progresses, Mia's actions become increasingly strange. At least this is what the film leads you to believe, but with any good "mother-horror," it's the mother who may be at fault . Her past trauma comes back to haunt her while Sarah continually lose her grip on reality.

Related: The Best Netflix Original Horror Movies, Ranked

Sarah carries a lot of trauma, from losing her sister when she was younger, to her mother developing Alzheimer's and her father passed away. These psychological and emotional issues make Sarah an unreliable narrator of sorts, and the film plays with her perception of reality and the people around her in twists that, although predictable, does work and is nonetheless shocking and disturbing.

Haunting Atmosphere

Daina Reid immediately shrouds audiences in a tense and haunting atmosphere. Through Bonnie Elliott's stunning yet creepy cinematography, and Mark Bradshaw and Marcus Whale's nerve-racking score, Reid is able to deliver a truly creepy experience.

As previously mentioned, Run Rabbit Run relies heavily on the tropes of maternal horror films established more than 50 years ago with films like Rosemary's Baby, Carrie , and even Psycho in a way. You have the kid acting strange and creepy with the mother simultaneously dealing with psychological issues, until a shocking twist at the end. Although these tropes are clearly evident, they don't necessarily hold the film back. It's simply that the lack of originality fails to compete against the subgenre's best. The film starts incredibly strong, but as it progresses, Run Rabbit Run will begin to lose its audience slightly because its heavy reliance on the tropes.

The jump scares are predictable for the most part here, though there are a few that are quite effective. Ultimately, it's the atmosphere and tension where the movie really shines. Scattered with haunting imagery, the film will continuously make audiences feel uneasy despite its flaws. Rarely has a rabbit made us feel so uncomfortable.

Kids are creepy and irritating — especially in horror movies. From the kid in The Babadook who irritated every single person upon their first viewing but ended up having a great arc, to the kid in The Poltergeist who hauntingly says, "They're here," kids can be a great way to get audiences invested in horror, and almost always adds to a creepy and disturbing atmosphere. Let's not forget the two twins from The Shining and Goodnight Mommy , after all. Creepy stuff.

Mia, the young girl in Run Rabbit Run, follows similar developments. She suggests that all is not at it seems almost immediately, and as the film progresses, Mia becomes more hostile, confrontational, abusive, and of course creepy. She's lingering in the background, drawing images a child of her age should never be drawing, and possessing knowledge of her mother's life and trauma which she should never know. On top of that, she even fashions herself a haunting mask which feels very much like something out of Pet Sematary or Children of the Corn .

Lilly LaTorre gives a fantastic and haunting performance as Mia. Her eerie delivery enhances the tension and uncomfortable nature of the film, cementing herself among the creepiest and most irritating (in a good way) children in horror. A feat not so easily achieved.

Related: Best Horror Movies With Creepy Kids, Ranked

Sarah Snook Can Do No Wrong

Currently, Sarah Snook is among the best actors working in the business. Her performance in the hit HBO show Succession was jaw-dropping and her roles in the horror movie Jessabelle and hard hitting drama Pieces of a Woman were simply flawless. Here, she gets to flaunt her impeccable acting chops once again as Snook essentially carries the weight of this psychological horror entirely on her shoulders.

At first Snook leads us to believe that Sarah is still a somewhat level-headed, charming, and caring mother. But it's actually how the movie delves into Sarah's insecurities, grief, and past trauma is where Snook really shines. Heightening the movie's tense and haunting atmosphere, Snook's powerful performance is utterly compelling. As her character loses her grip on reality, Snook's performance becomes unpredictable and unstable, making the twist in the latter half of the film far more satisfying and believable than it should be. Snook seals the deal here.

Run Rabbit Run is now on Netflix and can be streamed below.

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REVIEW: Netflix's Run Rabbit Run Is a Dull Exercise in Exploring Trauma Through Horror

The Australian psychological thriller Run Rabbit Run is all about trauma, but it doesn't offer any rewarding new approach to familiar themes.

It's become cliché to say that horror movies are all focused on exploring trauma, but that doesn't mean there aren't valid ways to incorporate trauma into the genre. The Australian psychological thriller Run Rabbit Run explores trauma, but it unfortunately lacks any rewarding new approach to familiar themes. Although the performances are strong, the plot is slow and repetitive, leading up to an underwhelming revelation and a vague climax. The trauma that the main characters experience should be tense and affecting, but instead it ends up mostly tedious.

Run Rabbit Run begins with the evocative image of Sarah ( Succession 's Sarah Snook) lying seemingly unconscious beside a river somewhere in the Australian outback. How she got there -- or even when that moment occurred -- is never quite clear, but director Daina Reid and cinematographer Bonnie Elliott continue creating striking images even as the plot goes in circles. Following that opening, Run Rabbit Run shifts to the suburbs, where Sarah works as a fertility doctor and lives with her seven-year-old daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre).

RELATED: Succession Was Always a Shiv Roy Story - Here's Why

Strange things begin occurring almost immediately as Mia celebrates her birthday, and Reid conveys a general sense of unease between Sarah and Mia. They return home to find their garage door open and a white rabbit mysteriously left on the front stoop. Mia starts insisting that she misses her grandmother Joan (Greta Scacchi), even though they've never met. "I miss people I've never met all the time," Mia says in one of many unsettling yet ultimately meaningless pronouncements. LaTorre makes for an excellent creepy kid, but Mia's sinister potential remains in the same holding pattern for the entirety of Run Rabbit Run .

Mia soon adds a truly grotesque homemade rabbit mask to go along with her newfound pet, becoming increasingly volatile and demanding. When Sarah gives in and takes Mia to visit Joan in the remote nursing home where she's been living, she learns that Joan has been suffering from dementia. Joan seems to mistake Mia for someone named Alice, but then Mia proclaims that she actually is Alice. Mia finds old photographs of young Sarah with another young girl and asserts that she's the one in the photographs. Maybe she's been possessed, or maybe she's just lashing out? Mia could be troubled by grief over the recent death of her grandfather or by tensions between Sarah and Mia's father Peter ( Damon Herriman ).

Run Rabbit Run introduces all of these possibilities without fully committing to any of them, while also presenting the possibility that Sarah is the one who's coming unhinged. She's also grieving the death of her father and growing frustrated with Peter, especially after he announces that he and his current partner are trying for a child of their own. Sarah is estranged from Joan, often ignoring calls from the nursing home, and she doesn't want to talk about what drove her away from her mother. Instead of providing answers, Run Rabbit Run mostly repeats the same scare tactics, with shadowy figures looming in the background and Mia suddenly appearing or disappearing in places she isn't supposed to be.

Run Rabbit Run 's themes of generational trauma and the pressures of parenthood recall acclaimed horror movies like Hereditary and fellow Australian productions Relic and The Babadook , but the result is closer to something like recent muddled psychological thriller Baby Ruby . There aren't enough scares for Run Rabbit Run to succeed as horror, and Reid and screenwriter Hannah Kent can never fully commit to any supernatural elements. The third-act reveal of a key incident from Sarah's past only partially explains what's going on, and the final shot hints at a more overtly menacing story that never comes into focus.

Snook remains compelling even as Sarah is cycling through the same actions and emotions over and over, and there's real anguish in her efforts to keep herself together and be a better mother for Mia than she believes her own mother was for her. Scacchi stands out in her handful of scenes as the alternately deranged Joan, but no one else in the supporting cast gets much to do. Herriman is especially wasted as the father who seems curiously disengaged from the turmoil between his daughter and her mother.

When Sarah and Mia travel to Sarah's childhood home, Run Rabbit Run makes the most of the neglected, dilapidated property, complete with an ominous shed full of creaking doors and dangerous metal tools. Like the themes of trauma, though, those elements don't rise very far above cliché, and Reid never uses them to their full potential. Horror movies that tackle mental illness and family tension still need to deliver the horror, but Run Rabbit Run comes off as a dull, meandering therapy session.

Run Rabbit Run premieres Wednesday, June 28, on Netflix .

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Run Rabbit Run review – Sarah Snook fails to spook

The Succession star is typically excellent but even her performance feels too familiar in this derivative ‘mummy horror’ flick

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M otherhood is mayhem. Just ask any woebegone mama of film history: Mia Farrow’s wide-eyed Rosemary Woodhouse, beset with paranoia; Margaret White, the religious zealot of Carrie who mistakes punishment for protection; the bloodthirsty Pamela Voorhees; the abusive Norma Bates.

Nowhere, though, is home to more mummy issues than Australia, a country that has hosted some of recent cinema’s stickiest forays into miserable mothers. See: The Babadook’s young widow defending her precocious son against a spindly storybook beast. Or 2020’s Relic , where three generations of women confront their relationships with one another while also confronting some sort of annoying demon disrupting their family reunion. Or, of course, Toni Collette’s longsuffering matriarch in Hereditary, her instantly famous diatribe – “ I AM YOUR MOTHER! ” – sending shockwaves through every mealy mouthed mama’s boy. If cinema can telegraph national identity, then Australia needs to go to therapy immediately.

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Into this lineage comes director Daina Reid’s Run Rabbit Run, an Australian mummy horror so indebted to its forebears that it feels derivative by default. The cliches fly thick and fast: a squall of wind in the distance, a barren landscape striated by naked branches, ghoulish dreams awash with eldritch images. And that’s just the first five minutes. Before long, we meet that most crucial of tropes: a mother, Sarah (Sarah Snook), and her creepy daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre).

It’s Mia’s seventh birthday, but everything feels grim. Mia’s grandfather has recently died, and mother and daughter are still riding the aftershocks of his death. The sky is pallid, and the house – a chilly place somewhere in the city – easily dwarfs its two inhabitants. Sarah trudges through melancholia to put on a birthday celebration: a quiet affair with her ex-husband, Pete (Damon Herriman), and his new partner, Denise (Naomi Rukavina).

A white bunny has somehow entered the house, to Mia’s delight and Sarah’s consternation. It takes to hiding under tables and in eerie corridors: an unwelcome guest whose presence is less adorable than alarming. We return to the rabbit throughout the night, sometimes in spine-tingling closeup, its eyes gleaming devilishly in the blue-dark. Not since Monty Python has a rabbit looked so bloodthirsty; it’s no wonder Sarah tries – and fails – to exile the feral creature when she thinks no one’s watching. “Piss off,” she chides the bunny, who promptly bites her.

The bunny becomes one of Run Rabbit Run’s most tantalising elements. Its arrival might be a Lewis Carroll reference, especially given the name of Sarah’s sister – Alice – who went missing as a child. But the film quickly does away with the bunny’s mystery (supernatural, or merely strange?) to focus on Mia’s increasingly hostile demeanour. Something’s been off-kilter since her birthday: she’s suddenly demanding to visit Joan (Greta Scacchi), Sarah’s long-estranged mother whom Mia has never met. Before long, Mia is insisting that she is Alice reincarnate.

These are certainly intriguing threads, but they can’t help but feel recycled. Mia’s uncanny, sinister quirks are pulled straight from The Babadook; Sarah’s strained relationship with her ailing mother hews a little too close to Relic, with which this film shares two producers. Snook, of course, is typically excellent, fresh from her turn as Succession’s petulant, scheming Shiv Roy in another spiky role here – but even her performance, as it heightens towards a crazed delirium, recalls Toni Collette’s in Hereditary.

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Run Rabbit Run pulls from each of these entries without ever quite congealing into its own work. At its worst, it replicates the most overplayed tendencies of so-called elevated horror, the subset of the genre which rejects outright thrills and chills in favour of a more subdued, and often duller, gloominess. Screenwriter Hannah Kent – better known for her novels – has a knack for morbid, moody portraits of women in isolated communities, but Run Rabbit Run leans on its atmosphere as a crutch, turning to an abstraction that feels increasingly limp. Something here is weird , we’re told for the fourth, fifth, sixth time.

Against all reasonable logic, Sarah returns to her late father’s country house with Mia in tow, where the film continuously hints at a darker current of dread eddying just beneath the surface: patches of blood that mysteriously appear on Mia’s forehead, or a back yard shed full of sharp tools. But these hints never erupt into something greater, and it begins to grow tiresome. Taken together, they play less like a film and more like a moodboard of scares. Motherhood, for all its mayhem, looks a little mundane.

Run Rabbit Run is being shown as part of Sydney film festival, on 10 and 15 June . It will premiere on Netflix worldwide on 28 June

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Netflix viewers warn others not to watch streamer’s No 1 movie: ‘Don’t waste your time’

‘succession’ star sarah snook leads new thriller, article bookmarked.

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Netflix viewers are cautioning one another from watching the movie currently ranking No 1 on the streamer’s Top 10-most watched list.

While the platform’s weekly TV list is typically overrun by new releases, the movie list is less predictable and often varies between recent releases and classics.

This week, director Daina Reid’s newest thriller Run Rabbit Run , starring Succession ’s Sarah Snook , is topping the US list.

Since its Netflix release on 28 June, the film has largely been panned by critics, with Clarisse Loughrey arguing that it “ticks off tropes as if it were conducting some sort of paranormal safety check” in her review for The Independent .

At the moment, it sits at 38 per cent on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. And yet, despite its poor ratings, numerous Netflix users have decided to take a chance on the film – hence its top ranking.

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However, now, they’re warning others not to “waste two hours of your life” by watching Run Rabbit Run.

“ Run Rabbit Run sucked, don’t watch it y’all,” one tweeted, with a second agreeing that “it really is as bad as people say it is. so disappointing”.

“It might be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen,” a third claimed.

“If you are thinking about watching Run Rabbit Run , DON’T,” another wrote. “2 hours of my life I’ll never get back.”

Others, however, disagreed with the negative comments. “ Run Rabbit Run is a great horror movie. So many revelations unsaid,” one opposed.

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Another questioned why it had “such a bad score on Rotten Tomatoes”, arguing that “it was actually really well done, especially for an Australian movie”.

“Heard a lot saying this one is too slow or boring but i thought it was a pretty good show of old traumas resurfacing,” another said.

Snook, 35, leads the Netflix chiller as Sarah, a fertility doctor who must confront her firmly-held beliefs in life and death after her daughter begins exhibiting strange behaviours.

Read The Independent ’s two-star review of the movie here .

Run Rabbit Run marks the Australian actor’s latest project following her award-nominated turn as Shiv Roy in HBO’s massive hit series Succession , which concluded in May.

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Rebel Moon 2 sets unwanted record for Zack Snyder

The sequel is a big low for the director on Rotten Tomatoes.

Following its release last week, the movie – which follows on from last year's Part One: A Child of Fire – already attained a brutal score on the site .

Rotten Tomatoes has now confirmed that The Scargiver is the lowest-rated film for Snyder, sitting at 15% at the time of writing – a bit below the first movie's 21% score.

Related: Zack Snyder explains Rebel Moon 2 's devastating twist

Digital Spy said in our two-star review that the sequel "suffers from the same flaws" as the first movie and that it is "hard to imagine anybody other than hardcore Snyder fans wanting to revisit this world".

"There's no denying Snyder has created an interesting world – he just forgot to tell an interesting story within it," we added.

Collider called the sequel "even worse than Part One " and that its "ambitions have gotten infinitely smaller", while TheWrap labelled both movies "shallow and generic space operas, distractingly derivative of better films while adding very little to the mix".

Related: Rebel Moon 2 ending explained: What happened to Princess Issa?

Last month, star Sofia Boutella opened up about the first movie's negative reviews , telling Vulture : "I always thought that I was fully armed to take on those punches, and then I read the critics that came down on Rebel Moon , and it really affected me.

"And I'm just gonna be honest about it. I feel like I'm carrying it for everybody that cared so much about this project, and that's what affected me. Not the way I look. If anything, I've been pretty lucky and people like my work in it, but the movie was criticized.

"It really affected me for all of those who put so much heart, tears, and sweat in this project. It’s hard to see something being demolished to that extent."

Boutella added that she was "proud to have been part of it" and that Rebel Moon will be a "very important part of my life that I will defend forever".

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver are available to watch on Netflix.

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Sam is a freelance reporter and sub-editor who has a particular interest in movies , TV and music. After completing a journalism Masters at City University, London, Sam joined Digital Spy as a reporter, and has also freelanced for publications such as NME and Screen International .  Sam, who also has a degree in Film, can wax lyrical about everything from Lord of the Rings to Love Is Blind , and is equally in his element crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' as a sub-editor.

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