Grief is hard enough without a wide-eyed, shrill-voiced little scamp in your kitchen scribbling black voids and red-eyed stick figures or whispering portentous nonsense in your ear. So spare a thought for Sarah Snook’s exasperated, recently bereaved matriarch in Netflix’s overly familiar Australian chiller. The woman can barely down her morning coffee without her deathly pale, cherub-faced daughter tugging on her trouser leg and nonsensically insisting that “I miss people I’ve never met all the time”.
Directed by Daina Reid, who was behind several episodes of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Run Rabbit Run ticks off tropes as if it were conducting some sort of paranormal safety check. Snook, magnetic in HBO’s Succession, stars as Sarah, whose father has passed. Her estranged mother (Greta Scacchi), a resident at a care facility, is in the early stages of dementia. Sarah has made emotional repression a fine art. She won’t share a single detail of her childhood with her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre). Only a few, scant details have been shared with her ex-husband Peter (Damon Herriman).
