Daina Reid’s Australian psychological horror, written by the novelist Hannah Kent, pits a fertility doctor against something her training never covered: a seven-year-old who insists she has lived before.

Run Rabbit Run reached Netflix on 28 June 2023, five months after its premiere in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival and a month after the final episode of Succession. It arrived with a line-up that raised expectations: Sarah Snook in the lead, Daina Reid, one of the directors of The Handmaid’s Tale, behind the camera, and a screenplay by Hannah Kent, the Australian novelist behind Burial Rites. On paper it is a maternal horror film of a kind the past decade has produced in quantity. What makes it worth a closer look is who made it, where the idea came from and the winding road the project took before it reached the screen.

A birthday, a rabbit and a grandmother nobody visits

Snook plays Sarah, a divorced fertility doctor who lives alone with her daughter Mia, played by Lily LaTorre. The story opens on Mia’s seventh birthday. Her father, Peter (Damon Herriman), comes to the party with his new partner, Denise (Naomi Rukavina), and Denise’s three-year-old son. Around the same time a rabbit appears at the house and Mia quickly grows attached to it. Sarah is less keen. When she tries to get rid of the animal by sending it over the garden wall, it bites her, and she realises that her daughter has seen her do it.

From the following morning Mia starts to change. She becomes unresponsive for stretches, wears a rabbit mask she has made herself and refuses to take it off. She also starts asking for her grandmother, Joan (Greta Scacchi), whom Sarah has kept at a distance for years and whom Mia has never met. Joan lives in an assisted-living home and has dementia. A school project on the family tree sends Sarah looking for old photographs, and among them she finds a picture of herself as a child with her younger sister. Mia says she is in that photo too. Meanwhile the bite on Sarah’s hand becomes infected and her nights fill with nightmares.

The premise comes into focus when Mia announces that she is Alice, the younger sister who went missing when she was seven, the same age Mia has just turned. Sarah has never told her daughter much about Alice. At Peter’s suggestion she takes Mia to the house where she grew up, and it is there that the film starts digging into what happened to Alice decades earlier. We will stop there. The last act depends on the answer, and the script is built to hold it back for as long as it can.

From a past-life story to a horror screenplay

The idea predates the film by several years. Hannah Kent had been thinking about writing a novel based on a true story about a Scottish child who claimed to remember a past life, and she had started researching similar cases. When the producers Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, of Carver Films, asked her whether she had any ideas for a screenplay, she suggested that storyline, imagined at first as a psychological drama. Her interest lay with the parent rather than the child: what it would be like to be the mother of such a girl, and the alienation she would feel when her own child no longer wanted her. Only later in development did the project move into horror.

Kent’s novels explain part of the appeal. Burial Rites (2013), her first, began as a doctoral thesis and tells the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland. The Good People (2016) is set in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1825 and follows a widow trying to cure a grandson whom her superstitious neighbours fear is a changeling, a fairy child left in place of a human one. Devotion (2021) moves to the Adelaide Hills, where Kent grew up. Unlike those books, Run Rabbit Run is set in the present day, but the central fear of The Good People, a child who may no longer be the child you knew, carries straight over into it.

Elisabeth Moss out, Sarah Snook in

The film was first announced in June 2020 with a different lead. Elisabeth Moss was attached to star, with Reid directing and XYZ Films selling the project at that year’s Cannes market; Moss and Reid had already worked together on The Handmaid’s Tale, and STXfilms took global distribution rights shortly afterwards. In December 2021 Moss had to pull out because of scheduling problems, and Snook took over the role. By then STXfilms was no longer involved. In January 2022 Damon Herriman and Greta Scacchi joined the cast, and shooting began that same week. Snook also serves as one of the film’s executive producers.

Principal photography took place in Waikerie, in the Riverland region of South Australia, and in Melbourne. McLeish and Shaw produced the film for Carver Films, with Naomi Mulholland as co-producer. XYZ Films co-financed it and handled worldwide sales, with further money from Screen Australia, the South Australian Film Corporation, VicScreen and Filmology Finance. After the Sundance premiere on 19 January 2023, Netflix acquired the rights for most of the world. The deal excluded the Benelux countries, Portugal, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Nordic countries and Taiwan.

The people behind the camera

Daina Reid, born in 1966, came to directing from acting. She trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, graduated in 1990 and became known in the mid-1990s on the sketch comedy show Full Frontal. She has been directing since 1999, mostly for television: the miniseries Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo, Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, INXS: Never Tear Us Apart, The Secret River and Sunshine in Australia, followed by episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Outsider, Space Force and Young Rock in the United States. Her work on The Handmaid’s Tale earned her a 2019 Emmy nomination for directing a drama series, and in 2017 the Australian Directors’ Guild gave her its Michael Carson Award for television drama direction.

The crew is drawn from the top tier of Australian screen work. The cinematographer, Bonnie Elliott, has won AACTA Awards for her work on the series Seven Types of Ambiguity and Stateless. The film was edited by Nick Meyers, and the score is by Mark Bradshaw, the composer of Jane Campion’s Bright Star and Top of the Lake, together with Marcus Whale. The finished film runs 100 minutes.

Sarah Snook between Shiv Roy and Dorian Gray

For Snook, Run Rabbit Run sits at a turning point. Born in 1987 and a graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, she made her name in Australian films such as Not Suitable for Children, These Final Hours and Predestination, and she had already worked in the genre with the American supernatural horror film Jessabelle in 2014. Her breakthrough came with Shiv Roy in Succession, which ran from 2018 to 2023 and won her the Emmy for lead actress in a drama series. Afterwards she voiced the animated feature Memoir of a Snail and took on The Picture of Dorian Gray on stage, playing all 26 roles, a performance that brought her both the Olivier and the Tony. Her work in Run Rabbit Run earned her an AACTA Award nomination for best lead actress in a film.

Around her, the film rests on a small cast. Lily LaTorre plays Mia, the film’s other central role. Damon Herriman is best known as Dewey Crowe in Justified and for playing Charles Manson twice in 2019, in Mindhunter and in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Greta Scacchi, who broke through in Heat and Dust (1983) and went on to White Mischief, Presumed Innocent and The Player, won an Emmy for the television film Rasputin. Sunny Whelan plays Alice, and Shabana Azeez, Trevor Jamieson and Georgina Naidu complete the cast.

A crowded corner of horror

Run Rabbit Run enters a corner of the genre that has been busy since the mid-2010s: horror built around a mother and a child, where the threat may come from outside the house or from inside the mother’s head. The Babadook (2014), by the Australian director Jennifer Kent (no relation to Hannah Kent), set the template; Hereditary (2018) and Relic (2020), another Australian film about a daughter, a mother and a grandmother with dementia, pushed it further. The comparison is hard to avoid, because the film shares their raw material: an isolated home, a family secret and a parent who cannot trust what she sees. What it adds is the past-life premise and a question about what Sarah did, or failed to do, as a child.

That leaves a film whose interest lies less in surprise than in the convergence it represents: a novelist who began with a real case of a child remembering another life, a television director moving to the cinema, and a horror lead for Snook that reached audiences in the same season Succession came to an end. Whether the familiar frame does justice to the story inside it is something each viewer will settle for themselves. The documented facts point to a modest Australian production that travelled from Sundance to Netflix with a cast few genre films of its size can claim.