Nightstream Film Festival: "Run" a conventional thriller made better by expert tension and commanding performances

Run (2020)

Run, don't walk, to catch up with filmmaker Aneesh Chaganty's 2018 feature debut "Searching." With that twisty missing-person thriller, it was made all the more gripping and interactive in how the mystery ingeniously played out from a laptop screen. His follow-up “Run” might be a little more conventionally plotted, but once again, Chagantry knows exactly how to skillfully tighten the screws in classical Hitchcockian mode. It's not psychologically probing, but with two commanding performances and muscular direction, “Run” is a slickly crafted, delightfully overwrought thriller that just works. 


For seventeen years, Diane Sherman (Sarah Paulson) has taken care of daughter Chloe (Kiera Allen), who was born premature and now suffers from hemochromatosis, asthma, diabetes, paralysis, and more maladies. Bound to a wheelchair, Chloe is homeschooled and on a strict schedule of medication and physical therapy. She eagerly awaits her college admission letters, and though she is so close with her mother, Chloe is ready to start her life. When she finds an unfamiliar prescription bottle with her mother’s name on it, her suspicions that Diane is not exactly the mother she thought she knew might be correct. 


With two less riveting performers at the center, “Run” might not have gotten away with some of the more obvious turns in writer-director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian’s screenplay. As its plot trajectory hinges on an inevitable reveal, the film does feel a tad bit familiar in the wake of Hulu’s excellent limited series “The Act,” a true-crime drama about a malady-stricken daughter and her overprotective mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In any case, Sarah Paulson (2019's "Glass") tapping into her inner Bette Davis-as-Baby-Jane-Hudson and Kathy Bates-as-Annie-Wilkes will always be worth the price of admission. Even if there could be more dimension to Diane, especially when we get a glimpse of a scar carved into a certain symbol on her back at one point and it’s never dealt with, Paulson finds a certain wounded humanity in the part. The audience knows when she is being deceptive, but Paulson sells Diane as a doting mother before tipping her hand as an unhinged villain. Fresh-faced newcomer Kiera Allen completely holds her own as well, and that the actress uses a wheelchair in real life makes her even more of a marvel to watch. A Taissa Farmiga lookalike, Allen is a true find, making Chloe not only likable and sympathetic but every bit as savvy and maybe even more intelligent than any able-bodied person.


Director Aneesh Chaganty deploys genre tropes—there does come that time when Chloe finds a shoebox of Convenient Exposition—but also goes against the grain with other particular beats. The fun comes from seeing how clever Chloe must be in connecting the dots behind her mother's back. A scene where Chloe must leave her mother in a movie theater for a "bathroom break" to sneak over to a nearby pharmacy across the street is nail-biting and leavened with well-placed humor. Other scenes where Chloe must make a private phone call, while her mother is outside gardening, or escape from her room also get right the expert blend of tension and crowd-pleasing laughs. For good measure, there are even cute nods to “Psycho” and Stephen King’s favorite fictional Maine town. Even as it gets increasingly more wild and nutty, “Run” doesn’t do too much more than expected, but this is still a taut, sharply made reality-based suspenser without any story fat on its bones.

Grade: B


The opening night selection of the festival, “Run” (90 min.) will be released on Hulu on November 20, 2020.

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