Run Rabbit Run is the latest Australian psychological thriller movie that premiered on Netflix, exploring themes of grief, trauma, and identity through the lens of a fertility doctor named Sarah (Sarah Snook) and her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre).
The movie begins with the death of Sarah’s father, which triggers a series of strange and disturbing events involving Mia. Mia adopts a stray rabbit, refers to herself as Alice, and expresses curiosity about Sarah’s past and her missing sister Alice (D’Arcy Carty).
The movie also introduces elements of mystery and suspense, such as unexplained nosebleeds, injuries, photographs, and noises that challenge Sarah’s perception of reality. Finally, it culminates in a shocking revelation that connects Sarah’s present with her past and forces her to confront her suppressed memories of Alice.
The ending of Run Rabbit Run leaves some questions unanswered and some aspects unclear, which require further analysis and interpretation.
1. What happened to Mia’s sister Alice?
The movie reveals the truth about Alice’s fate through a series of flashbacks that occur during Sarah’s mental breakdown. The flashbacks show that Sarah accidentally killed Alice when they were children, after a violent altercation that started with Sarah locking Alice in a cabinet.
She then lied to her parents and said that Alice ran away, which caused a rift between her and her mother (Greta Scacchi). The movie suggests that Sarah’s unresolved trauma and guilt over Alice’s death are the root of her psychological problems and her dysfunctional relationship with Mia.
2. Run Rabbit Run Climax Explained
The movie ends with a disturbing scene of Mia and Alice walking towards the cliff, while Sarah watches helplessly from the window. There are two main interpretations of this scene.
One is that Alice is a supernatural entity that has been haunting and possessing Mia, and that she is taking Mia with her to the afterlife. This interpretation, however, does not fit with the genre and tone of the movie, which is a psychological thriller that does not explicitly involve any paranormal elements.
The other interpretation is that Sarah is imagining the scene as a result of her mental breakdown. This interpretation is more consistent with the movie’s focus on mental health, grief, and trauma, which are recurring themes throughout the movie. Sarah’s hallucination could represent her fear of losing Mia, her guilt over killing Alice, or her desire to reunite with Alice.
I personally also feel that considering Mia’s mental trauma, the second interpretation makes more sense.
3. Sara is an Unreliable Narrator
The movie gradually reveals Sarah’s unreliability as a narrator and her deteriorating mental state. The movie hints that Sarah is projecting her trauma onto Mia, who does not seem to share Sarah’s awareness of her abnormal behaviors, such as calling herself Alice, drawing disturbing images, or having nose bleeds and injuries.
The movie also shows that Sarah is experiencing hallucinations and delusions, such as seeing photographs reappear, hearing noises, and reliving the moments of Alice’s death.
The movie culminates in Sarah’s complete loss of touch with reality, as she imagines Mia walking with Alice towards the cliff and drowning in the water. The movie portrays Sarah as a victim of her own mind.
4. Who made the disturbing drawings?
One of the clues that reveal Sarah’s unreliability as a narrator and her mental instability is the presence of disturbing drawings on Mia’s homework and library book, which Sarah attributes to Mia.
However, the movie shows a scene near the end where Sarah is drawing the same image from the library book on the floor of her parents’ old house, without being aware of what she is doing. In contrast, the movie shows Mia drawing a normal tree on a paper, which Sarah flips over and finds nothing else. These two scenes suggest that Sarah was the one who drew the disturbing images all along, not Mia.
The previous scenes about the drawings also support this idea. The teacher who confronts Sarah about the drawings assumes that Mia drew them, but the papers where the drawings were found came from Sarah’s home, not from school.
Sarah also had access to the library book where she found a black box scribbled over an image of a girl falling from a cliff. Sarah does not remember drawing any of these images, which indicates how detached she is from reality. She is suffering from a severe mental disorder that makes her project her trauma onto Mia and act in ways that she cannot recall.
5. Sarah’s Hand Injury in Run Rabbit Run
The movie shows a subtle connection between Mia’s and Sarah’s injuries, especially their smashed hands. Mia injures her hand when Sarah accidentally slams it with a drawer.
In the following scene, Sarah also injures her hand by closing the car door on it, but this is easy to miss because of her lack of reaction. The movie implies that Sarah deliberately hurts herself to mirror Mia’s injury, which reveals her poor mental health. She is unable to cope with the guilt of hurting her daughter, so she resorts to self-harm as a way of feeling better.
6. About Run Rabbit Run
Run Rabbit Run is a 2023 Australian psychological horror film directed by Daina Reid and written by Hannah Kent. It stars Sarah Snook, Lily LaTorre, Damon Herriman and Greta Scacchi.
The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 19 January 2023 and released on Netflix on 28 June 2023. The film focuses on Sarah (Sarah Snook) and her daughter, Mia, and how they struggle to cope with their mental trauma.
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