Dian Sherman has just given birth to a premature baby, and while she watches it lying inside an incubator, she asks the nurses if the baby will be ok. The only answer she gets is total silence. Uh-oh, that’s a really bad sign. Then we fast forward to several years later, and we see that Diane lives a seemingly fine life with her teenage daughter Chloe. Chloe’s life, on the other hand…she suffers from arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, asthma, and diabetes. To top it all, her legs are also paralysed. Fucking yay. She’s confined to a life in a wheelchair, and needs to take a batch of medications everyday. Oh, and she’s homeschooled by her mother, of course. What a surprise. Chloe’s one and only desire (aside from better health, of course) is going to college, and she eagerly awaits an answer to her applications. Whenever Diane gets the mail, the answer she gives Chloe is always the same: no response from any of the colleges. Oh well, no choice but to stay stuck with mommy dearest for the rest of your life, girl. Or…maybe mommy dearest is not such a dear after all. One morning, Chloe finds a prescription bottle including some green pills, but the name on the bottle is Diane. The thing is…Diane wants Chloe to swallow these green pills. What’s in those pills? Are mommy’s intentions perhaps not so motherly after all?
Run is a psychological horror thriller directed by Aneesh Chaganty and co-written by Sev Ohanian. It stars Sarah Paulson as Diane (known for several roles in the American Horror Story series, and as Ratched in the netflix series) and Kiera Allen as Chloe. Kiera has been a wheelchair user since 2014, which makes this movie the first major thriller to use an actual wheelchair user since Rear Window (1998).
There’s no doubt that Run is a solidly made thriller, yet the biggest problem is that there really isn’t that much of a mystery here: we know very early on that Diane is off her fucking rocker, and is deliberately trying to keep Chloe confined in the home. Just to what extent she’s actually taking it, and what her reasonings might be, is what the plot is slowly unfolding. Is she just a worried mother that wants to keep her sick child close to her, or is something else wrong here? Well, of course it’s the latter, that’s not even a spoiler. Still, it’s fun to watch as Chloe continues trying to outsmart her mother and dig deeper into what is really going on.
There’s also some fun easter eggs in the movie, including a pharmacist named Kathy Bates, which considering the movie’s setting is an obvious nod to Kathy Bates’s role as Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990). Diane certainly ain’t no Annie Wilkes, though, and I have to admit that Chloe’s situation often didn’t feel quite as threatening as it could have been, but the movie still offers enough suspense and entertainment to keep you engaged. And as you probably start expecting already from very early on in the movie, there are a few twists and turns throughout the story.
Despite being a little predictable at times, Run is a pretty fine thriller with some solid performances and a decent suspension level. Recommended if you want a popcorn thriller on a lazy evening.
Side note: this film was the last film Aneesh Chaganty directed, before meddling with generative AI by creating the infamous I H8 AI short. And no, it’s not a short about actually hating generative AI, but rather a short that kind of tries to show how “creative“ a director could be if he had generative AI tools so he could, well…not be creative at fucking all. Unless you consider typing “plz make background look like Manhattan“ and hit a button as “creative“. The short was made as a collaboration between Meta and Blumhouse, and the reception was, as expected, not good. The backlash even caused it to be removed from Letterboxd. After this, Chaganty has been pretty silent and there’s currently no upcoming projects on IMDb under his name. If he does make more movies, I certainly hope he can take a Heretic in the credits and state that the movie was made without generative AI.
Director: Aneesh Chaganty
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian
Country & year: USA, 2020
Actors: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen, Sara Sohn, Pat Healy, Erik Athavale, BJ Harrison, Sharon Bajer, Onalee Ames, Joanne Rodriguez, Ernie Foort
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8633478/
