Review | Run movie review: Sarah Paulson plays an overprotective parent in absurd thriller
- Run stars newcomer Kiera Allen as Chloe, a home-schooled and wheelchair-using teenager who starts to suspect that her mother (Paulson) is hiding a dark secret
- Set almost entirely within the confines of their home, the movie bears an uncanny resemblance to Misery, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller
3/5 stars
If the 2018 film Searching championed the lengths to which a desperate father would go to trace his missing daughter, then writer-director Aneesh Chaganty’s follow-up could be seen as a cautionary postscript, warning against the dangers of overprotective parenting.
Set almost entirely within the confines of their secluded family home, Run bears an uncanny resemblance to Misery, Rob Reiner’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller. In that film, James Caan plays a bestselling novelist who is rescued from a car wreck by his number one fan (Kathy Bates), only to be secretly kept prisoner in her home.
Chaganty’s film follows the structure of Reiner’s wince-inducing thriller almost beat for beat, so closely that it could almost be called a remake, but Run’s character dynamics address a very different agenda.
Chaganty highlights how easy it has become to educate and even medicate yourself entirely independently without so much as an eyebrow of concern being raised over the lack of community interaction or expert consultation.
Run also exposes the frightening degree of autonomy that a parent wields over their child, how authorities are all too willing to defer to a parental ruling, and how that position of absolute power can be exploited in truly terrifying ways.
Paulson has built a career on bringing authenticity to full-blown genre caricatures. One need only look at her work in Netflix’s outlandish Ratched for confirmation of her commitment to grounding the absurd.
Diane is a tragic figure, whose situation embodies the worst nightmare of every new mother, yet has succeeded in raising an intelligent and capable young woman who defiantly refuses to let her physical limitations impede on her experiences. Allen is compelling in a role that is both physically demanding and drags her through the emotional ringer.
Run poses the question: “What if the person you depend on most posed the greatest danger to you?” and Chaganty fully commits to delivering breathless thrills and outrageous revelations, rather than lecturing us about the real-world implications. Even when it borrows a little too readily from its forerunners, the movie manages to stay on its feet.