The hair-raising trailer for Run Rabbit Run, the new Australian horror movie starring Sarah Snook, is out now – watch it below ahead of its June release date on Netflix.
Snook – who has been captivating audiences as Shiv Roy in the ongoing bombshell season of HBO’s Succession – leads Run Rabbit Run as a single mother who, while mourning her late father, becomes increasingly disturbed by the strange behaviour of her daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre).
The movie was acquired in January by Netflix, which confirmed today (May 10) a release date of June 28. The official first-look trailer introduces Snook as grieving protagonist Sarah, who’s revealed to have had a sister Alice who went missing when she was seven. Mia takes a liking to a stray rabbit (and an unsettling animal mask) – and becomes fixated on the idea that she is Alice.
Today, Run Rabbit Run was also announced as part of the official program of this year’s Sydney Film Festival – building on its existing success on the festival circuit, at Sundance’s Midnight Section in January. Tickets are now available for its Sydney Film Festival screenings on June 10 and 15.
Filmed on-location in South Australia’s Riverland region, Run Rabbit Run reunites Snook with Aussie filmmaker Daina Reid following their collaboration on 2015 ABC series The Secret River. Others cast in the film include Damon Herriman, Greta Scacchi and Trevor Jamieson.
Snook, who replaced Elisabeth Moss in Run Rabbit Run in 2021, brought “an exciting unpredictability” to the role, producer Anna McLeish told NME. The film was an opportunity for Snook, flush from the international success of Succession, to “own and lead a film in its entirety”, the Carver Films co-founder said.
“There’s hardly a frame of the film that Sarah’s not in,” she added. “Her work in Australia before that had been really accomplished and really amazing, but I don’t think she’d really had that kind of opportunity to carry a film to that extent… It’s really exciting for audiences to see Sarah Snook, particularly international audiences who really identify mainly with her now as Shiv, in such a different place.”
Director Daina Reid makes her feature debut with Run Rabbit Run, joining forces with Carver Films again after the 2017 SBS crime series Sunshine. Reid is also a fan of Aussie author Hannah Kent, who wrote the script on Run Rabbit Run, McLeish revealed – even going as far as to travel to Iceland to see where Kent had written her award-winning novel Burial Rites.
Reid “loves this space: she loves genre… she really loves getting into the darker side of it and the more monstrous side of it all,” McLeish said. Her work on The Handmaid’s Tale – which earned her an Emmy nomination in 2019 – exemplified for McLeish how Reid could command “tension and rigour”, and “follow a strong female character through to some pretty hard places”.
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Run Rabbit Run lands at a healthy moment for Australian horror cinema, especially films led by female protagonists: You Won’t Be Alone and Sissy earned plaudits in 2022, as did Carver Films’ Relic from 2020 (not to mention Elisabeth Moss’s own The Babadook from 2014). It’s a small industry and many of these filmmakers know each other, McLeish acknowledged, but she wouldn’t call this horror wave a movement that has emerged by design or through discussion.
“They’re all different. People will say some have strengths, some have weaknesses, but undoubtedly within that particular canon of work, I think Run Rabbit Run will sit really comfortably – which is exciting to see.”