Run (2020) — Movie Review
Directed by: Aneesh Chaganty. Produced by: Natalie Qasabian, Sev Ohanian. Screenplay: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian. Starring: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen.
Judging by the trailer, Run didn’t look like it had much to offer. Another run-of-the-mill thriller movie about “something bad is going on” is not particularly interesting. I was going to brush it off but I decided to give it a chance as it had Sarah Paulson featuring on the movie poster, and I consider her to be a very good actress. The movie wasn’t particularly bad, but it had a few issues.
The plot (spoiler-free)
This 90-minute thriller follows the life of Diane Sherman (Sarah Paulson) and her wheelchair-bound teenage daughter Chloe (Kiera Allen). We don’t know what’s wrong with Chloe, but we know she can’t walk and she needs to take a handful medications on daily basis. We see her caring mother who nurses, exercises, and feeds her, and who also provides the only link between Chloe and the outside world. Chloe suspects Diane is keeping a dark, horrific secret and as she tries to uncover the truth, she kickstarts a series of events that lead to confrontation, murder, and Chloe’s eventual emancipation from Diane’s grip.
The good parts
The movie’s premise was fine: a caring mother who isn’t actually who she says she was. When her daughter suspects foul play, the daughter has to make the choice of accepting the status quo or fight for her life. So far so good.
The first 15 minutes did a fine job laying the ground work for the upcoming events. It showed us the relationship between the mother and her daughter. It gave us insight into both of their personalities, which is important to understand why they both act the way they do throughout the movie.
Both actors did a fine job portraying their characters, Sarah Paulson having the edge of being an experienced actress with 66 film and TV series credits to her name. The supportive actors weren’t bad, and their scenes were integral to moving the plot forward.
Where it went South (including a bit of spoilers)
I didn’t need to go farther than the first 10 minutes in order to stop and ask: what does Diane do for a living? I can swallow the fact that she can single-handedly afford a countryside two-story house, her own car, a back garden large enough to provide their daily food, a gigantic library, home schooling for Chloe, and paying for groceries, water, electricity, and Chloe’s medication and assistant devices. That’s all fine and dandy.
Now here’s what I failed to swallow. How could Diane afford to stack all those drugs in her basement? Did she steal them? How, when and where from? The basement contained dozens of drugs, some of which are controlled medication that can’t be bought without prescription. And there literally were shelves filled with them. It was mentioned in the hospital that Chloe changed her treating doctor many times, hinting that Diane was trying to hide something, but that still can’t account for the drug arsenal Diane had in her basement.
The medical inaccuracies weren’t critical, but they still managed to get under my skin. Chloe was poisoned for many long years. How come she developed weakness in her legs but not her arms or body? How did she become completely awake and fully functional in the hospital, right after she woke up from anesthesia (it took me an hour to sober up after my cholecystectomy operation)? And how did Diane remove Chloe’s tracheal tube without ripping her throat out?
And why in the devil’s name did Diane keep all those incriminating photographs and newspaper articles? This specific scene was really absurd and silly, I felt that it was specifically put there to let Chloe know what was actually going on. I can’t help but think that it was easier for the scriptwriters to drop everything in this scene than to do their actual homework and write a better script that explains things in a subtle way.
The last part of the movie, while satisfying to the viewer, didn’t make much sense. Apparently, Diane is being held in a women’s correctional facility, and Chloe visits regularly to update her mother on what’s happening with her life, and (of course) to exert her revenge by feeding Diane the exact same pills she used to feed Chloe. It seems Chloe has been doing this on a regular basis for the past 7 years. Now tell me, where did she get the pills from? I doubt her mother’s stock would have lasted that long. And why was Diane shocked when she saw the pill, giving you the feeling that it was the first time this happened, while obviously Chloe had been doing it for a long time (7 years, to be specific)? This point isn’t critical, but it still didn’t sit well with me.
My conclusion
So how do I rate Run? Well, it was good in terms of plot, acting and dialogue. The story had many holes, and you can’t help as your mind goes off the movie trying to understand why and how things happened the way they did. Both main characters were interesting, with understandable and relatable backgrounds, motivations and aspirations. The cinematography wasn’t bad and the sound effects were decent. Overall, it wasn’t a bad movie. I give it 6/10.
