A sense of dread permeates Australian director Daina Reid’s (The Handmaid’s Tale) début feature film, Run Rabbit Run, which had its première at Sundance earlier this year.

Following in the footsteps of recent Australian horror films Relic (2020) and The Babadook (2014), as well as American features such as Hereditary (2018), Run Rabbit Run portrays a single mother dealing with trauma and grief. Reid’s feature centres on Sarah (Succession star Sarah Snook), a fertility doctor at a clinic who lives a hectic and demanding professional life but an isolated private one in a rural town in South Australia, with her seven-year-old daughter Mia (Lily LaTorre). While Sarah is fatigued and stressed by her chaotic work demands, she spends the little free time she has with her daughter, who is displaying and spiralling into increasingly aberrant behaviour. Mia’s drawings of bodies with limbs removed alarm her mother.