Run Rabbit Run Ending Explained: More Questions Than Answers
Daina Reid's "Run Rabbit Run," now streaming on Netflix, is a slow burn that never quite unravels the truth, leaving the audience with more questions than answers. The film constantly obfuscates reality, forcing viewers to wonder what is genuine, supernatural, or the psychological unbalance of the main character Sarah. Sarah Snook gives a hard-edged performance as a single mother whose daughter Mia (an adorably eerie Lily LaTorre) has started imitating her sister Alice who has been missing since she was a little girl.
In an interview with Nightmarish Conjurings, Reid says that her film explores "what happens when you suppress an incredibly traumatic event" and "notions of culpability." Reid filters Sarah's intense, repressed emotions through perplexing scenes that prompt doubt about whether or not what you're looking at is real or in Sarah's head. Alongside this psychological tension is familiar horror iconography: a seemingly possessed child, unexplained nosebleeds, and creepy drawings on the back of school projects. Ghostly figures linger in the background of dark rooms.
"Run Rabbit Run" requires patience as it gradually reveals what happened to Alice and Sarah's relationship with her. The abstract structure of "Run Rabbit Run" can be interpreted as a visual manifestation of what happens when you bury past emotional wounds, but there are other ways to read the ending.
What you need to remember about the plot of Run Rabbit Run
"Run Rabbit Run" opens when Mia turns seven — the same age when Alice disappeared. Mia's birthday party brings her complex family dynamics to the forefront. She misses her grandfather, who recently passed away; her father and mother are divorced; Sarah is estranged from her mother Joan, going so far as to hide her birthday card for Mia. Although it is never explicitly shown, Sarah likely had a challenging upbringing living in the shadow of her missing sister.
A series of strange coincidences regarding Alice start to occur. On the night of her birthday, Mia discovers a rabbit at her door and yearns to keep it, despite Sarah's discomfort and attempt to let it loose. Alice had a fondness for animals and used to take in strays all the time. Mia then develops an obsession with Grandma Joan, whom she has never met. When Sarah reluctantly brings Mia to visit her grandmother, she repeatedly calls her Alice. Mia also insists that a photograph of Alice and Sarah belongs to her. These peculiar interactions raise doubts about whether Mia is possibly the reincarnation of Alice or possessed by Mia's ghost.
As we delve further into Sarah's troubled past, it becomes clear that she harbors a profound anger regarding her sister and mother triggered by Mia's strange behavior. By constantly bringing up Alice, Mia digs into a deeply buried wound and brings it to the surface after so many years — much like the rabbit bite Sarah receives. During her rageful fits, Sarah unintentionally (?) hurts Mia, shutting the car door on her fingers or cutting Mia with scissors while attempting to treat her bleeding head (coincidentally in the same spot where Alice was once injured). Sarah's violent outbursts are concerning, forcing you to question how often they have happened before.
What happened at the end of Run Rabbit Run?
When Sarah takes Mia to visit her childhood home, a strange confluence of possible ghostly occurrences, bottled-up memories, and delusions occurs. Within this emotionally painful setting, Reid slowly puts together the puzzle pieces of what really happened to Alice. Mia continues to claim that she is Alice and chastises Sarah for bullying her as a child. Back in the isolated, unstable environment of her youth, Sarah's grip on reality begins to loosen and she recalls locking Alice in a shed as a young girl. After Sarah set her free, they got into a physical fight and Sarah pounded her on the head with a steel trap (used for rabbits?). Alice eventually stumbled outside, and Sarah pushed her off the cliff to stop her screaming. When Sarah confesses all of this to Mia, who may or may not be Alice herself, she calls her a monster.
At one point, Alice wakes up in a hypnotic state, frantically destroying the wood floor by drawing bizarre, repeated lines. This likely indicates that it is Sarah who made the drawings, not Mia. Mia's father Peter arrives at the house to help search for his daughter who is missing somewhere in the Australian countryside. The next morning, after they find her, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment you can see Peter lying face down on the bed, his face covered with a pillow. Is this just his odd way of sleeping, or did Sarah kill him? His body appears very stiff and unmoving. Sarah looks for Mia and discovers her walking hand-in-hand with her sister Alice toward the cliff, refusing to stop even for Sarah's screams.
What does the end of Run Rabbit Run mean?
The unsettling image of Alice and Mia glancing back at Sarah poses the question of whether Alice's ghost waited until Mia was seven to possess her. If so, was Alice a malevolent spirit seeking revenge for her untimely death or a benevolent force protecting Mia from her abusive mother, who we've seen potentially kill Mia's father and harm Mia several times? Alice may be helping her niece escape because she does not want Mia to suffer the same fate as her. While there is a jump scare with the blurry shape of Alice in the garage, that's the only overtly supernatural element in the film.
A ghost theme contradicts Reid's statement on "Run Rabbit Run" as an exploration of repressed trauma and guilt. The frequent appearances of Alice are not a haunting, but rather a visual representation of how Sarah cannot escape her remorse for murdering her sister. No matter how much she tries to forget, her grave transgression constantly looms over her, completely spinning her mental health off its axis. Reid brings this to life through her fragmented directing style, using subjective framing, extreme close-ups, and flashbacks to immerse the audience in Sarah's psychological instability. While the "All Just a Dream" horror trope can be annoying, "Run Rabbit Run"'s commitment to slipping between what's real and what's not keeps you on the edge of your seat until the final frame.
Mia may have learned about Alice from Peter, or maybe she never mentioned Alice at all. Maybe it was all in Sarah's imagination because Mia's turning seven triggered the memories of her crime. "Run Rabbit Run" is a mind trip from Sarah's POV that showcases what happens when you fail to confront and heal from your past.
What does the rabbit symbolize?
Another sign that the movie primarily occurs in Sarah's imagination is connected to the rabbit, which screenwriter Hannah Kent elaborates on in Nightmarish Conjurings:
"Obviously, it's a symbol of victimhood in many ways as a prey animal. In Australia, it has a lot of resonance as being a pest of the landscape, particularly, which is shown to have a lot of a wild rabbit population. So there's also this sense of being haunted, being plagued by something allowing us to use sometimes in a heavy-handed, sometimes in a more subtle way to represent metaphorically the things that we were interested in exploring."
There's also an obvious connection between Alice's name and the white rabbit from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland." Much like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into the bizarre world of Wonderland, the audience of "Run Rabbit Run" descends into Sarah's fragmented subconscious as she attempts to reconcile with the terrible crime she committed against her own flesh and blood. The rabbit symbolizes Sarah being relentlessly pursued by her guilty conscience. As much as she would like to forget, she cannot outrun what she has done, and it is far too quick to emotionally devastate her. The memory is always there, waiting for the right trigger to hop back into the forefront of her mind, effectively destroying her well-being.