run 2020 movie reviews

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You’ll be able to figure out where “Run” is headed pretty quickly, but that doesn’t detract from the precise thrills and campy fun along the way.

This is the follow-up from the guys who made 2018’s “ Searching ,” a taut, clever thriller starring John Cho as a frantic dad looking for his missing daughter, which took place (almost) entirely within the confines of laptop and cell phone screens. It was a gimmick, but a brilliantly executed one, and it offered Cho the opportunity to give a tour-de-force performance in a situation where there’s nowhere to hide.

With just their second feature, director Aneesh Chaganty and his co-writer, Sev Ohanian , expand the scenery but maintain the same tight narrative focus. And even as things get a little nutty by the end in a way that deviates from the quiet, slow burn that came before, the performances in what is essentially a two-hander always remain gripping. We’ve seen Sarah Paulson do this sort of simmering-beneath-the-surface insanity for years, but it’s always chilling to watch. Her technique is so specific, and she keeps you on edge with just the slightest facial expression or unexpected line delivery. But the great discovery of “Run” is Kiera Allen , making her feature film debut. As if performing opposite one of the greats working today weren’t daunting enough, “Run” asks a ton of Allen in a physically and emotionally arduous role, and she’s up for every challenge. She’s a real find and a joy to watch.

“Run” begins, though, in a quietly harrowing way. With echoes of the Ryan Murphy series “Ratched,” we see Paulson’s Diane Sherman at a hospital where everything is bathed in a sickly green light. She’s just given birth to a tiny baby who arrived prematurely, and a title card lists a variety of illnesses including arrhythmia, asthma and diabetes. Seventeen years later, we see Diane living an extremely organized but seemingly happy life with her daughter, Chloe (Allen), who runs through her daily routine from her wheelchair. (Casting a disabled actress for this part also makes Allen an excellent choice.) This includes medications and physical therapy but also hours of homeschool, which Diane administers. Mom also cooks healthy meals with the vegetables she grows in her own garden. Everything is carefully controlled. Chloe is clearly an intelligent young woman, as evidenced by the many complex engineering projects she works on in her bedroom, and she would seem to have a bright future ahead of her.

Yeah, that’s the thing. Chloe has dreams of leaving home and her isolated town—and her mom—to study at the University of Washington, four hours away. It’s not that they have a dysfunctional relationship. It’s just that it’s only been the two of them in that remote house for so long, and since Chloe hasn’t been allowed an iPhone or internet access all these years—which is more than a tad suspicious—she’s understandably yearning to explore the outside world. The way Diane insists a little too defensively that she’s totally fine with this possibility during a support group meeting suggests that perhaps she’s … not.

So much of what makes the clockwork of “Run” tick comes from the tiny details and the editing, the work of Nick Johnson and Will Merrick . Following their usual schedule and noticing slight tweaks along the way gives us the creeping sense that there’s a disturbing shift underfoot. Part of the fun of “Run” is that, as in “Searching,” we’re solving the mystery of what's truly happening right alongside the main character. A prime example of this approach occurs at the pharmacy when Diane and Chloe head into town to see a movie (and the title on the marquee is good for a chuckle). We’re putting the pieces together at the same time Chloe is, and we can feel her panic as the tension steadily escalates. Later, in one of the film's more physically demanding scenes, Chloe must MacGyver her way out of a tricky situation, but the fact that Chaganty and Ohanian have laid the groundwork for her smarts and resourcefulness makes it a blast to watch, and not at all ridiculous. So many of Allen’s scenes require her to act alone and pull us along wordlessly, which would be difficult even for a seasoned actor, but there’s a wisdom and a confident stillness about her that’s compelling and grounding.

And that’s crucial, because “Run” gets a little wild as it barrels toward its conclusion—less Hitchcock, more “ Misery .” But there are some unexpected twists and turns within the big reveal as to what’s actually going on here. And during these bizarre times when we’re all stuck at home ourselves, “Run” may just be the escape we needed all along.

Now playing on Hulu. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic content, some violence/terror and language.

Kiera Allen as Chloe Sherman

Sarah Paulson as Diane Sherman

Pat Healy as Tom

• Aneesh Chaganty
• Sev Ohanian

Cinematographer

• Hillary Spera
• Torin Borrowdale

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Run Reviews

Run is a riveting rollercoaster ride from start to finish, pairing a pulse-pounding plot with powerhouse performances from Sarah Paulson and Kiera Allen.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

“Run” is a sneakily absorbing thriller that pokes at the idea of a mother’s domineering love and a child’s blind trust.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 25, 2022

You pretty much know where “Run” is going to go, but it gets there in the most entertaining way possible.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 13, 2022

Just stylish and thoughtful enough to escape being cheap shlock. Instead, it's classy and enjoyable shlock.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2021

What could have been a throwaway piece of B-grade schlock is elevated to an A-grade armrest-clutcher thanks to a chilling premise, superb direction in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock and a lead performance from Kiera Allen that is an absolute pearler.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 2, 2021

Chaganty's career remains something worth keeping an eye on, even if this sophomore effort doesn't quite hit the highs of his debut.

Full Review | Original Score: 3 / 5 | Jun 26, 2021

A minor anecdote that Chaganty takes to wild extremes, although always building with a firm hand a suspense with a credible and remarkably transmitted by Allen's omnipresent disengaged face. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 15, 2021

The problem ... is Chaganty seems to earnestly believe he is making a serious thriller, refusing to acknowledge the vein of absurdity that runs through the entire thing.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2021

To a large extent, "Run" plays like gangbusters.

Full Review | Apr 30, 2021

Gets by almost entirely on the energies of its two lead actresses, including a beautifully villainous Sarah Paulson and newcomer Kiera Allen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 30, 2021

Taut, compelling and with just the right scale and intensity to keep us engrossed without ever going too far over the top and collapsing into camp.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 30, 2021

Run starts off as a Horror movie, but quite soon it becomes clear that this is an A to Z Thriller flick. Halfway through audiences should probably turn up a notch their suspension of disbelief in order to keep enjoying this one.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 21, 2021

...Run sets up a Rear Window/Misery story of captivity and attempted break-out, but squanders almost all of the screen-time on admittedly engrossing physical detail...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 17, 2021

Both leads are simply fantastic, and the simple premise unfolds with energy and intensity.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2021

Although it riffs on Stephen King's 'Misery' a great deal, 'Run' has enough genre thrills and chills going for it to make itself more than just a simple cover version.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 13, 2021

It's (Sarah Paulson's) American Horror Story pedigree which suggests there's more to this film than there really is.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 9, 2021

A problem with the film is its insistence to keep the characters mysterious.

Full Review | Apr 6, 2021

"Run works as a compelling thriller because it casually reminds viewers that disability is a class that anyone can join. Whether by birth, accident or malice, anyone can become disabled, and so disability rights and concerns apply to everyone."

Full Review | Apr 4, 2021

Another absorbing and effective thriller whose simple premise is executed with skill, good acting and no need for exposition. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 2, 2021

Chaganty fully commits to delivering breathless thrills and outrageous revelations, rather than lecturing us about the real-world implications.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2021

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‘Run’ Review: Bad Medicine

Sarah Paulson plays a menacing parent in this enjoyably ludicrous thriller.

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‘Run’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director aneesh chaganty narrates an escape sequence from his film, featuring kiera allen..

Hi, I’m Aneesh Chaganty, and I’m the co-writer and director of Run. O.K. So the scene that’s playing out right now takes place in the second act of the movie. Without giving much away, the basic setup is this. So our daughter, played by newcomer Kiera Allen, has been locked in her room by her misaligned mother, played by veteran Sarah Paulson, and is convinced that she needs to escape. From a form standpoint, I think what you’re about to watch is actually one of the few sequences that breaks the pattern of the film’s aesthetic. Much of the film’s style is sort of borrowed from the films of Hitchcock and Shyamalan, and those films don’t just choose shots because one thing can happen in them. They designed frames where, like, four or five things can happen in them. So to borrow a page out of their book, I storyboarded every single frame of this movie by hand before we started shooting. You can actually compare the boards to the final film. It’s all pretty identical. So right now, we’re watching Chloe, who’s this super resourceful and smart and inventive girl, sort of MacGyver a solution out of her room. Chloe uses a wheelchair, so a solution that an able-bodied person might have come up with won’t work for her. She has to overcome that with just sort of pure intelligence, and she does. Every single shot inside this room here is repeated from an earlier shot in the movie. I wanted to be super spare with the visuals of this movie and always design frames that could be repeated so that when things start to explode narratively, like right now, it would feel like real catharsis. [MUSIC PLAYING] So all of this was shot on a stage in Winnipeg. We basically created the entire second story of his house on a stage, and the first story and the outside— what you’re looking at now— is all on-location. So now we’re kind of jumping into the single most complex shooting process of the entire film, where this whole sequence is about to stitch so many different skill sets and elements and shooting days into one. So she just kind of comes out onto her roof. We’re landing on a shot of Kiera in a stage on a set where the roof is actually flat and the walls are tilted to the side. It looks sort of like a really cool— it’s hard to describe, but just movie magic makes that work. So the camera’s just tilted. She’s actually perfectly flat on the ground. We’re just tilting her hair a little bit and occasionally blowing wind to the side. And that’s her face pushing forward a little bit, and sort of a blue screen behind her. The next shot you’re going to see is going to be from the side, and that is a stunt double. But it looks like Kiera because we face-replaced Kiera’s face onto it. And this shot sort of was actually the first shot that we did on day one of shooting. And we had to shoot it on day one, because we shot in Winnipeg, Canada, which is, like, the coldest place ever, and we had to shoot out our exteriors first before everything started snowing. We started shooting October 31st of 2018. By the way, the house was chosen because it just felt like when we saw it that it looked like it was, like— you could put it on a movie poster and draw it out and put Sarah Paulson’s face above it, and it just had the vibes of this old-school, Hitchcock house, so there’s just like secrets inside of it and stuff. This is a shot on set, again, on this little fake, made roof. This is another shot on set. Obviously, we did not put Kiera on an actual roof with danger. But this whole sequence, we shot over multiple, multiple days. And she still has a bunch of water in her mouth that she swallowed from earlier. She plugs in a soldering iron, heats up the soldering iron, and puts the soldering iron to this glass in the cold, where it immediately starts to kind of crack because the heat is expanding it, and then immediately will spit out some water onto the glass, where it shatters the rest of it. This is actually a technique. One of my best friend’s dads is a glass blower, and taught me this over the phone. So that’s the end of one of the biggest set pieces of the movie, which honestly tries to do what we were trying to do with this whole movie, which is take a normal house and turn every single element of that house into a massive Burj Khalifa-scale obstacle.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. Balancing on the backs of umpteen matriarch-from-hell movies, the director Aneesh Chaganty brings us “Run,” a nifty little thriller whose title pleads for an exclamation point.

And not just because of its hyperventilating style. Sarah Paulson’s performance in the role of Diane — a single mother so controlling she’s more prison warden than parent — flickers with camp. That tone is on display when Diane insinuates to fellow home-schoolers that, for the past 17 years, her sickly daughter, Chloe (Kiera Allen), has made her life a misery of servitude. And it fully blooms in the movie’s dementedly operatic final scenes, when the scales have slipped from Chloe’s eyes and Diane is revealed in all her deranged glory.

Before then, the movie hints at a mildly sinister hostage drama as Chloe, smart and (like Allen herself) in a wheelchair, waits for her college acceptance letter and navigates multiple chronic health conditions. Surprisingly cheerful for someone with neither friends nor phone nor unmonitored internet access, Chloe maintains a comfortable codependency with Diane, who provides pills and plausible reasons for denying her daughter further freedoms. Until a troubling discovery kicks Chloe into an unexpectedly suspenseful battle for more than just the right to online privacy.

This will involve stunts both elaborate and hazardous, and Allen, in her first feature role, is convincingly up for all of them. Despite a script (by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian) that sees no need to flavor its tension with flashbacks or character-fleshing, “Run” has fun with its ludicrous plot. As when Chloe persuades Diane to take her to a movie and we glimpse its title on the marquee: “Breakout.”

Run Rated PG-13 for a nasty rash, a toxic beverage and a very unlucky mailman. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Hulu .

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Common sense media reviewers.

Dark domestic thriller has violence, mature themes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Courage and perseverance can literally save your l

Lead character Chloe is strong, resilient, brave,

Teen trapped in a house, locked in rooms. Chase sc

Some talk of dating.

"Goddamn" and an implied not fully said "motherf--

A mother drinks wine occasionally. Scenes of homem

Parents need to know that Run is a thriller about an abusive mother who has been making her child sick and the attempts of the teen trying to escape. The film is dark, suspenseful, and has moments of emotional and physical terror and violence. Diane, a child abuser with Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another,…

Positive Messages

Courage and perseverance can literally save your life. Those who commit harm, crimes, and abuse will be caught and punished.

Positive Role Models

Lead character Chloe is strong, resilient, brave, curious, and intelligent. She works on fixing her electronic 3d printer and other devices. She also overcomes many dire and terrifying situations with grit, ingenuity, and hope. She does kill in the end, however.

Violence & Scariness

Teen trapped in a house, locked in rooms. Chase scenes, fleeing, moments of peril and terror. Guns, woman shot in shoulder, some blood. Two forced syringe and needle druggings. An implied murder by pills. Dead mailman dragged across floor leaves blood trail. Premature baby struggles to breathe in incubator and later a mother sobs while holding her. Some scenes with emotional torment.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"Goddamn" and an implied not fully said "motherf----r."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A mother drinks wine occasionally. Scenes of homemade drug concoctions meant to incapacitate and/or kill. Syringes, pills, and talk of medications.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Run is a thriller about an abusive mother who has been making her child sick and the attempts of the teen trying to escape. The film is dark, suspenseful, and has moments of emotional and physical terror and violence. Diane, a child abuser with Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, formerly Munchausen syndrome by proxy, hides a tragic past. She entraps, forcefully drugs, and threatens to kill her daughter Chloe. With a syringe and needle Diane knocks out a mailman and later kills him, dragging his body across the hallway floor, which leaves a trail of blood. Chloe tries to escape Diane and various dire situations. Chloe gets locked in bedrooms, chained to a wall, chased a lot, hurt when tumbling down stairs, forcefully drugged multiple times, threatened, and kidnapped; all these scenes can be scary. Diane sometimes suddenly appears in the background or in the dark. Adults drink wine. Language includes "goddamn" and an implied "motherf----r." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (30)

Based on 3 parent reviews

What's the Story?

In RUN, 17-year-old Chloe (Kiera Allen) lives a solitary life except for her mother Diane ( Sarah Paulson ), who tends to her daughter's every medical need and has done so for her entire life. Chloe supposedly suffers from arrhythmia, hemochromatosis, asthma, diabetes, and paralysis of her legs, the latter of which has required her to be in a wheelchair for as long as she can remember. The only problem is that Chloe starts to realize some oddities about the care her mother provides. Chloe's extremely limited freedoms are odd, the way her mother always gets to the mail before Chloe is odd, the way the Wi-Fi doesn't work when her mother isn't home is odd. Some of the medicine her mother gives her isn't what it seems. If Chloe had to escape her mother, how exactly could she manage that? What lengths would her mother go to stop her?

Is It Any Good?

Not a deep look into the behavioral and mental health complexities and nuances of Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, this thriller only wants to thrill, and it just about does. In terms of quality, pace, writing, acting, and thrills, Run is on par with and sometimes exceeds director Aneesh Chaganty's first feature, the chillingly disturbing Searching . For Run , Chaganty structures his focus on child abuse and parental derangement in three acts: family horror, hostage drama, escape thriller. By the time the pace ramps up entering the finale, lead character Chloe has more than earned her freedom. Run is a platform for two great performances, one a terribly menacing desperate mother from Sarah Paulson and the other a courageous first-time lead achievement for Kiera Allen, who is also a wheelchair user in real life.

In some other ways, by the time the epilogue rolls, some viewers may find some logical gaps and inconsistencies, even if parsing them out would have only likely bogged things down. There's a distinct lack of any scenes of Chloe's childhood or growing up alone with no friends, television, public life outside visiting the pharmacy, or grander curiosity about the outside world. Somehow, Chloe made it all the way to 17 before really questioning or seeing the horrible things her mother was doing. Lastly, the film's ending may leave some viewers disappointed.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Run portrays Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (Munchausen syndrome by proxy). How is it different from other films or tv shows that also feature this form of child and sometimes elder abuse?

Sadly, many people lose a child, but what was different about Diane's loss that made her turn to kidnapping, abuse, and murder?

Was the portrayal of Chloe a strong one? If you were in her situation, would you have done anything differently? If so, what?

Do you think Chloe's last act at the end was necessary? How would the film have looked if she had done something else?

Why do you think people are interested in tragic stories based on real life? Does Run glamorize any part of the abusive caregiver? Does it glamorize any part of the person under their care? Explain.

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : November 20, 2020
• Cast : Sarah Paulson , Kiera Allen , Pat Healy , Sara Sohn
• Director : Aneesh Chaganty
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Hulu
• Genre : Thriller
• Character Strengths : Courage , Perseverance
• Run time : 90 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : Disturbing thematic content, some violence/terror, and language.
• Last updated : March 12, 2023

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‘run’: film review.

'Run,' Aneesh Chaganty's follow-up to 'Searching,' watches as a teen (Kiera Allen) tries to escape the clutches of her desperately possessive mother (Sarah Paulson).

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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A delicious Hitchcockian thriller about the perils of maternal codependency, Aneesh Chaganty’s sophomore feature Run proves wrong anyone who might’ve suspected the attention given to his 2018 Sundance darling Searching was due to its screens-centric formal gimmick. (The film, which opened the online Nightstream festival Thursday, will debut on Hulu November 20th.)

Release date: Nov 20, 2020

Paulson plays Diane, who has spent the last seventeen years as sole caregiver for a child with an assortment of special needs: Chloe (Allen) is paralyzed from the waist down, diabetic and asthmatic, has serious heart and skin issues — everything but a nut allergy, it seems. Yet she’s a remarkable girl: bright, resourceful, and eager to start life on her own just as soon as the University of Washington sends her an acceptance letter.

Opening scenes displaying the friendly ease of the pair’s home-school routine — handfuls of pills throughout the day, a rigorous lesson plan, a surprising lack of teen resentment — also casually inform us that this kid, unlike nearly all others, has no always-on connections to the outside world. No phone, and seemingly no computer in her room, though one wonders how she uses the 3D printer she’s repairing without one. The point is, it would not be easy to do detective work if she were to suddenly worry Mom might be up to something shady.

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Hulu's sarah paulson thriller 'run' to open virtual nightstream fest.

Well, she is. At least one of the pills she’s giving Chloe wasn’t prescribed for the girl. The first couple of scenes after Chloe’s suspicions arise observe how quickly the two women improvise, each pulling plausible lies out of the air with a smile when the other asks a dangerous question. Neither buys the responses, but neither will admit it. Chloe finds clever ways to seek answers about the prescription, and the script neatly thwarts them — until a nail-biting sequence in which she learns what’s being done to her. Diane catches her mid-discovery, and the film enters full-on Misery mode, with the wheelchair-bound girl held prisoner in her own bedroom.

What do you do when you can’t walk, your bedroom door is barred and you’re on the second floor? Chaganty stages an answer that blends MacGyver-like ingenuity, ticking-clock tension and palpable physical peril. Once the scene is done, you might suspect there was an easier solution. Try not to let that ruin the thrill.

While Chaganty’s go-to composer Torin Borrowdale supplies a classic-feeling orchestral backdrop, the film keeps us guessing without seeming too thirsty to impress us with twists. The couple of big ones in store make the most of the plot’s metaphors about the dark side of procreation and a child’s existential need to create her own identity.

Having given us a rescue-minded dad in Searching and a daughter who must do her own rescuing here, perhaps Chaganty will next build a thriller around that most familiar archetype, the mother who’ll surmount any obstacle to protect her child. If so, don’t count on it going quite the way you expect.

Venue: Nightstream Film Festival Production company: Lionsgate Distributor: Hulu Cast: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen, Pat Healy, Sara Sohn Director: Aneesh Chaganty Screenwriters: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian Producers: Sev Ohanian, Natalie Qasabian Director of photography: Hillary Spera Production designer: Jean-Andre Carriere Costume designer: Heather Neale Editors: Nick Johnson, Will Merrick Composer: Torin Borrowdale Casting director: Rich Delia

PG-13, 89 minutes

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A gripping new thriller from the director of Searching.

12 of the Most Outrageous Twists in Movie History

IGN's Best Reviewed Movies of 2020

Deftly filmed and edited, Run is undoubtedly effective on the small screen, but few other films this year have built and held tension this expertly, so as to be immediately worthy of a room full of people reacting in unison.

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Chloe, a teenager who is confined to a wheelchair, is homeschooled by her mother, Diane. Chloe soon becomes suspicious of her mother and begins to suspect that she may be harboring a dark se... Read all Chloe, a teenager who is confined to a wheelchair, is homeschooled by her mother, Diane. Chloe soon becomes suspicious of her mother and begins to suspect that she may be harboring a dark secret. Chloe, a teenager who is confined to a wheelchair, is homeschooled by her mother, Diane. Chloe soon becomes suspicious of her mother and begins to suspect that she may be harboring a dark secret.

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• Trivia Kiera Allen (Chloe) has used a wheelchair since 2014. The filmmakers wanted to cast a disabled actress, stating that Hollywood rarely casts disabled actors for disabled roles. [Variety Magazine]
• Goofs As a suicide risk, Chloe should have a 1:1 sitter at all times- a staff member, or at the least, a video monitor, to make sure she doesn't try to harm herself. The room should have been cleared of any sharp objects, as well as wires, ties, cords, hospital linens, etc, that could be used to make a noose. The nurse/doctor even acknowledges this risk by not allowing Chloe to use her pen, but commits a grave error leaving her alone in the room.

Chloe Sherman : I... don't... need you.

Diane Sherman : You will.

• Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Sarah Paulson/Henry Golding/Car Seat Headrest (2020)
• Soundtracks Do Me Like Performed by Beatnet Written by Brandon Stewart Courtesy of The Math Club

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• November 20, 2020 (United States)
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Home » Streaming Service » Hulu

Run (2020) review – a tense and suspenseful story on evil motherhood

This review of Hulu and Netflix film Run contains no spoilers. The thriller was released on Hulu on November 20, 2020. It was later released on Netflix on April 2, 2021.

If you have watched the popular series The Act ,  then you will be faced with familiarity when watching Hulu’s  Run,  a film that was meant to receive a theatrical release but was snared by the streaming service in turbulent times. The story is nearly identical, following young teenager Claire (played by newcomer Kiera Allen) who is brought up by her overbearing and silently abusive mother Diane (played by Sarah Paulson). Like the mentioned series, the mother has medically controlled her daughter into believing she has a range of pre-existing conditions that have reduced the quality of her life, essentially making her a life-long prisoner unbeknown to herself.

As the story unfolds, Claire starts to uncover the truth, and that’s when the thriller tropes come into play. Beat by beat, Run  is generic in its style, substance and delivery, but there are specific scenes that will have viewers on-edge, as Claire has to find a reasonable way out of a physically demanding ordeal. Props have to be sent Kiera Allen’s way, who plays a convincing human being trapped in her body. When Sarah Paulson is off the screen, it paves the way for Kiera to shine and she certainly does so.

Run  does get caught up in its predictability; the suspenseful moments have viewers second-guessing the outcome, but with each predictable answer coming their way, each twist gets a little less impactful each time. I suppose from my perspective, because I’ve seen a similar plot play out in serial format, I knew the nuisances and the challenges that would come for the lead characters.

There is an emotional aspect to  Run.  While most sympathy is aimed at Claire, viewers can feel some slight pity for the mother, who experienced a traumatic birth and finds herself dedicating her whole life in keeping her daughter within the realms of this medically-induced existence. The Hulu series reflects the mental inflictions that can impact a mother post-birth. While Run  is a seriously severe example, there’s some element of truth in the protectiveness that props up her overbearing and illegal nature. And with that angle slightly engrained into the writing, the story suddenly becomes the story of a tragic relationship, disrupted by truth, rather than an evil woman keeping a young woman against her will.

As the credits rolled, a thought did cross my mind; it’s highly unlikely that I will watch  Run  again. It’s one of those thrillers that you enjoy like a cheeky Big Mac. It tastes good, but once you consume and settle, it’s not that filling.

Article by Daniel Hart

Daniel is the co-founder of Ready Steady Cut and has served as Editor-in-Chief since 2017. Since then, Dan has been at the top of his game by ensuring that we only produce and upload content of exceptional quality and that we’re up to date with the latest additions to the streaming and entertainment world.

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Run (2020) Review

The unrelenting fright of a mother who’s your number one fan.

The terror of relying on an untrustworthy caregiver is readily available for frights. Run , Aneesh Chaganty’s newest horror flick flips the terror of helplessness into a story of perseverance and capability, an important story of a wheelchair user who is anything but bound.

Chloe (Kiera Allen) lives with her mother, Diane ( Sarah Paulson ) in a rural house. She can’t wait to go to college and the only thing that seems to matter to the young budding adult is getting that acceptance letter and breaking free of the walls of her home. Diane is protective, something that seems reasonable for the mother of a child with special needs. Chloe is a wheelchair user shown to have asthma, diabetes, a heart issue, and a skin condition. Chloe is shown managing these things for herself in her daily routine, parts of which her mothers assists with, by preparing her food and doling out her medications. Wanting just a couple extra of the chocolates her mother meticulously divvies out to her, Chloe peeks into the grocery bags one day and discovers an unfamiliar medication prescribed to Dianne. When the mysterious green pill shows up in her cup later that day, Chloe grows uncharacteristically suspicious of her loving mother.

This sets off an intense game of panicked investigations and a lack of trust, that ultimately turns into a terrifying cat-and-mouse game between the two leads. Chloe, learning of what she is truly capable, attempts to best her mother without ever letting on that she might be suspicious.

This film wears its classic horror influences on its sleeve. The overbearing caregiver smells a lot like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? but it dives headfirst into classics when it not so subtly names the pharmacist “Mrs. Bates.” But though it leans on terror themes from films like Rear Window and Misery , Run is decidedly a modern feature that crafts scares we’re familiar with in more modern horror flicks, and uses the set differently by having it be accessible to our heroine, Chloe. 

Again, while its influences are palpable while remaining its own thing, Run exploits paranoia in ways that will remind you of Hitchcock thrillers. Aside from the protagonist being a wheelchair user, Run also borrows from Rear Window with its use of confusion and unsurety that will have the audience questioning what is real as much as Chloe does. The power of gaslighting and the loss of control are where much of the horror comes from, Chloe slowly discovering how much power she has given to her mother and her adaptability in trying to steal in back.

Co-writer and director, Aneesh Chaganty, known for Searching , continues the hot streak of suspense building. Though this film is less packed with twists and turns than its predecessor, it still oozes tension and reveals that keep you nervously tapping the entire runtime. It doesn’t bother trying to deceive the audience too much and ultimately uses a few tired tropes for exposition, but if Joker can get away with it, so can Run . A refreshing fact about this flick is that it’s scary. Point bank. It scared me. Though our heroine never once waivers, the fear stems from losing faith in the one person she was meant to trust completely. Setting off a hunt full of frantic and desperate attempts to break free from what was once comfort and is now a prison, Chloe’s situation stays terrifying and tense the entire way through. It feels like a full feature of a person frantically waiting for a file to download in time to save the world.

Newcomer, Allen, is herself a wheelchair user, a refreshing casting choice for a plethora of reasons that brings extra realism to her performance. What’s more is that she absolutely demolishes the role of the sweet heroine whose world has been shattered. Allen is likeable and warm, delivering a well acted performance balancing her fear with a ‘never say die’ attitude that will have you cheering for Chloe at every turn. Paulson continues to prove why she has become a staple in horror circles by delivering a dual performance as the loving mother and the batshit villain. Chaganty’s visual storytelling combined with her performance brilliantly uses things like open car doors, long pans, and empty hand reveals that will make you gasp at this new take on Annie Wilkes. The standoffs between Chloe and Dianne are a blast, with the two plucking lies from the ether in ways that turn a breakfast table into a battleground.

Though it doesn’t break a tonne of molds in its storytelling and themes, by centering on the heroine who is never positioned as over-coming her disability, but instead using her abilities, Run blasts through tired tropes on how different types of bodies are often used for terror.  

Munchausens by proxy has been explored in docuseries’ and dramatizations, most notably in the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and The Act . By centering this tale on the badass heroine and villainizing the abusive would-be caregiver, Run breathes new life into the trope that shows no mercy to the ill aggressor.

Final Thoughts

After submitting her Bachelor's thesis, “The Metaphysics of Schwarzenegger Movies,” Lindsay decided to focus on writing about her passions; sci-fi, horror, sports, and comic books. She covers movies and games for CGMagazine and you can follow her work on Twitter @smashtraves.

This post may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, CGMagazine may earn a commission. However, please know this does not impact our reviews or opinions in any way. See our ethics statement.

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‘Run’ Review: Merritt Wever’s Great Escape

• By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

When Merritt Wever won a supporting-actress Emmy for Nurse Jackie in 2013 (she later got another for the Netflix Western Godless ), she gave an eight-word acceptance speech before practically sprinting off the stage — “Thank you so much! I… gotta go. Bye!” Perhaps it was a moment of foreshadowing to HBO ‘s Run , produced by Fleabag ’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge , in which Wever’s character, Ruby, receives a one-word text that gives the show its title.

That missive prompts Ruby to blow up her life and go on a cross-country adventure with Billy (Domnhall Gleeson), a figure from her past who wonders, among other things, whether they still have their old chemistry. Boy, do they. The heat between them is palpable enough to carry this oddball mix of sexual farce and Alfred Hitchcock thriller, even if it’s never as funny as you might hope for from a team-up of Wever and Waller-Bridge.

The actual creator is Vicky Jones (though Waller-Bridge has a cameo), who sets up the premise by deliberately withholding information about both leads. We meet Ruby sitting in her car in a West Coast parking lot, very much not looking forward to her next yoga class, when Billy’s text arrives. Soon she’s on a plane to New York, then linking up with him for a train odyssey, faster than either she or we can consider exactly what it is she’s risking with this impulsive trip. And the nature of whatever is going on forces both of them to keep secrets from one another, even as they acknowledge those secrets exist.

So their flirtation brings elements of both role play and interrogation, which in turn allows the viewer to act as detective along with them. How much of what they say is real? What’s the true history between them? Should we be rooting for them to succeed in whatever their mission is, or is one or both of them a monster who’d be better served being thrown off the train while it’s still in motion?

At one point, Billy assures Ruby that people forgive all manner of sins. “Not this,” she says. “Who does this?” It’s in the transitions between lust and recrimination that Wever really shines.

Though she was tremendous as one of the detectives in last year’s  Unbelievable on Netflix , Run feels more explicitly like the star vehicle she’s earned through years of endearingly loopy scene-stealing work in TV and film. (Even before the Marriage Story fight scene became a hot meme, Wever’s prompt kitchen entrance and exit had become a beloved gif.) When performers move from supporting to lead roles, they can risk losing the traits that made them so distinct, or they can simply feel overexposed. Here, more Wever is a very good thing. Ruby feels like the kind of loose, energetic, self-deprecating character she’s played lots of times, but she’s also more than plausible as the romantic (anti?) heroine of the story, and as a woman who would prove so tempting to a would-be master of the universe like Billy. She’s convincing as someone who would drive him wild with lust, but also as someone who would fret about how he’ll react when he gets a look at her “flappy vagina.” (These are two words that Wever may have been put on this earth to say.) She even sprints sheepishly.

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Wever’s boundless appeal, and Gleeson’s willingness to make an ass of himself early and often, go a long way towards compensating for the dawning possibility that Ruby is right to hate herself for what they’ve done. But Run is often neither fish nor fowl in its blend of different tones and genres: rarely funny enough when it’s trying to be a straightforward comedy, nor taut enough when it shifts into mystery mode. Later episodes involve Archie Panjabi from The Good Wife as a woman whose path keeps crossing that of our two fugitives; those installments operate close enough to a thriller space that the modest humor level is more fitting. (Hitchcock movies are funny for suspense stories, but you wouldn’t watch most of them if you were specifically looking to laugh.)

I was happy to go into Run blind about what was happening and why. In the early going, that uncertainty about what the show is proves nearly as engaging as the stars themselves. But I finished the screeners HBO provided still unsure of exactly what Jones, Waller-Bridge, and company are attempting to do here, beyond providing a delivery system for raw, uncut Merritt Wever.

Which, frankly, is enough for now.

Run premieres April 12th on HBO. I’ve seen the first five of seven episodes.

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Screen Rant

Run ending & hospital scene twist explained.

Run's surprise twist ending will surely get audiences talking — here's our breakdown of what happened and what it means for Chloe and Diane.

WARNING: Major spoilers for  Run  ahead

Director Aneesh Chaganty's 2020 thriller,  Run , leaves audiences with a breathtaking ending that raises quite a few questions about Chloe, Diane, and what their future will look like in the aftermath.

After his 2018 critically acclaimed directorial debut,  Searching , Chaganty returned to form in the psychological thriller sub-genre with  Run , which stars Sarah Paulson ( American Horror Story ,  Ratched ) and Kiera Allen. Exploring a mother/daughter relationship that has become strained due to Diane's obsessive hovering and smothering that directly ignores her daughter's desires for independence,  Run  proposes how a mother's love can be oppressive and even dangerous when she's threatened with losing her child. However,  Run  digs far deeper than that — it explores mental illness and co-dependent relationships, and while Diane is certainly not a sympathetic villain, her troubles are rooted in real life terror.

Related: Every Delayed 2020 Horror Movie

Run 's ending shows Chloe turning the tables on her long-time captor; Diane is at her most vulnerable in a psychiatric facility. While this might seem like an open and shut ending, there's a lot to unpack about Chloe's mindset and Diane's ultimate fate that weren't made clear by the time the credits rolled.  Run  provides powerful commentary on the lasting effects of trauma, the cyclical nature of abuse, and how people can value justice or even vengeance more than a clean break. Here's our breakdown of  Run 's ending, the hospital twist, and what it all means.

What Happened In Run's Ending

After Diane's showdown with armed officers at the hospital while she was trying to escape with Chloe, she was wounded and ended up being institutionalized. While it might seem to Chloe's benefit to cut Diane out of her life, it speaks to her mental state that she continues to visit Diane in the hospital. Chloe could have easily detached from Diane, especially since Diane isn't her biological mother and possibly hasn't even legally adopted her. Beyond that, at the end of the movie, Chloe is an adult who has started a career of her own in the medical field, has a partner, and a child of her own. She's managed to create a successful life for herself on her own merits and seemingly has no reason to continue keeping Diane around. She does this because she wants to continue asserting control over her "mother" to assuage the emotional strain that stems from the period of her life where she had none. It's a complicated relationship, and seemingly always has been, but it's interesting that Chloe is so focused on vengeance after the fact when she seemed to always want her freedom before.

What's Going To Happen To Diane?

Chloe gives Diane a familiar green pill in  Run 's ending scene, which ultimately seals her fate. The audience is familiar with what the medicine does to someone based on how Chloe reacted to it throughout the movie. However, Diane is also subjected to whatever medications or treatments are being prescribed to her by hospital staff; she could be even more helpless, in that regard, than Chloe ever was despite her many illnesses. Presumably, Chloe's access to medicine means that she'll be able to not only continue getting this prescription filled to pass it along to Diane as continuing punishment and even torment for what she's done, but the ending also suggests Diane will be trapped in the institution forever. She's committed serious crimes; it's unlikely she'd be eligible for release, but there's nothing that says she couldn't eventually escape.

Diane has proven herself to be highly intelligent and capable; she's also manipulative, and if she managed to garner sympathy from someone, she might even be able to con her way out. It's unclear whether  Run  will receive a sequel, but since Diane is alive at the end of the movie and still has Chloe in her life in some capacity, it's possible a future storyline could see them at odds again. There's also the chance that, over time, Chloe will stop visiting Diane entirely. In a way, this would likely be a worse fate for Diane — she'd be completely disconnected from Chloe, and never have access to her again. Diane's obsession with Chloe and delusions don't seem to have faded even though she's been forced to come to the reality of her situation, to some extent. However, Chloe being fixated on doling out vengeance rather than condemning Diane to true suffering plays into  Run 's deeper meaning.

Related: Who Was The Better Nurse Ratched? Louise Fletcher vs. Sarah Paulson

Run Ending Explained: What It Really Means

At its core,  Run  is about the cyclical nature of trauma, violence, and abuse. Even though Chloe managed to successfully escape Diane's clutches and start a seemingly successful life of her own, she's never able to escape what has been done to her. Instead of carving out a separate space for herself with her newfound freedom, she continually visits Diane and keeps her under her control. She inadvertently feeds into Diane's own delusions that Chloe cares for her, at least to the extent that she won't abandon her completely, and reinforces Diane's belief that Chloe " needs " her. In a way, the two women do need each other — their relationship was incredibly toxic, but the cycle of abuse and violence can result in the victim becoming an abuser. This is certainly not what always happens; people who have endured horrors like Chloe has survived can go on to become well-rounded, highly functional, happy people.

However, the final scene of  Run  suggests that, for some people, there really isn't an escape. Chloe's body is permanently altered from the long-term abuse and poison that she endured as a result of Diane's illness—very likely Munchausen syndrome by proxy —and she can't completely forgive her "mother". Beyond that, the more terrifying implication made in the movie's ending is that Chloe is empowered and even freed by finally being able to maintain full control over Diane. She's aware of where she is at all times, she's able to witness her in a vulnerable, isolated state, she can decide when they interact and when they don't, and she's in a position to literally give Diane a taste of her own medicine without anyone stopping her. It's a twisted quid pro quo that offers the thought that empowerment and control mean different things to people. Chloe has seemingly found some sort of closure or solace in now being able to become Diane's caretaker while constantly serving as a painful reminder of how Diane's obsession with control cost her everything.

Next: The Best Horror Movies To Watch On Hulu

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Run’ on Hulu, a Bad-Mom Thriller in Which Sarah Paulson Takes the Psycho Path to Crazytown

Where to stream:.

• Sarah Paulson

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Hulu movie Run falls smack into American Horror Story and Ratched star Sarah Paulson’s wackjob wheelhouse. She plays a mom whose wheelchair-bound teenage daughter has a litany of health issues, so they mostly stay home in their insular little bubble, and the more we get a sense of the situation, the more it has that should-we-eat-this-ham-from-the-back-of-the-fridge sense of slightly slimy, slightly ill-smelling off ness. Of course, if all was just fine and sandwich-ready, there might not be much of a movie here.

RUN : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The operating room. Surgeons resuscitate what appears to be a premature baby. The mother, Diane Sherman (Sarah Paulson) peers through the incubator glass, hope and despair mingling on her face. SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER: Diane has homeschooled Chloe (Kiera Allen) her whole life, and it’s been pretty effective, maybe too effective, because the kid seems pretty damn smart. She pulls herself out of bed into her wheelchair, takes a handful of pills for her irregular heartbeat and blood disorder, rubs ointment on her omnipresent skin rash, hits the inhaler for her asthma, checks her blood sugar, eats breakfast, does 90 minutes of physics, reads her lit assignment and waits for the postal carrier to come, hopefully with a University of Washington acceptance letter.

Mom, meanwhile, substitute teaches or tends her impressive garden, watering hose in one hand, wine in the other. They live in a nice country house on a dirt road and there are no neighbors in sight. One day, Chloe dips her hand into a grocery sack and finds a prescription bottle with Diane’s name on it. But inside are the pills Chloe takes every day. Hmm. She waits for her mom to leave to call the pharmacy, but the pharmacist immediately recognizes the number so Chloe hangs up. The mailman arrives and she rushes to the door only to find Mom holding the envelopes and a little short of breath, the car parked and still running with the door hanging open as if she raced to intercept the delivery and this is all starting to have the whiff of BAD HAM.

Chloe creeps downstairs in the middle of the night and — well, she can’t creep. She has to painstakingly get into her wheelchair and take the motorized lift down the steps as quietly as possible, but she’s resourceful. She fires up the computer (Mom won’t let her have an iPhone, gee I wonder why) and searches the name of the medication, but then the internet connection goes out, and maybe Mom was sitting in the dark watching the whole time? Chloe says they should go to a movie, and in the middle of a thriller titled Breakout (ha ha) she says she has to go the restroom but instead goes across the street to the pharmacy to get a phillips head to further loosen dear Mom’s already-loose screws, and pop this unsettling little mystery wide open.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Director Aneesh Chaganty nurtures some good Baby Jane / Misery / Carrie / Mommie Dearest vibes here. And one scene has more than a little Kill Bill in it.

Performance Worth Watching: Of course Paulson is delightfully twisted as the mama gone bananas, but Allen makes the most of her feature debut, digging deep for an intense, sometimes psychologically grueling performance.

Memorable Dialogue: “Sorry everyone, coming through, I’m paralyzed, feel bad for me.” — pressed for time because her mother is bonkers, Chloe pushes her way to the front of a long line at the pharmacy

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Chloe can’t run — hence the irony of the generic movie title — so she has to wind up her brain-gears in order to escape Codependenceville, pop. 2. It’s a bit of a bummer that Chaganty spends two acts establishing Chloe’s resourcefulness only to undermine it down the stretch as Run hops a jetliner to the remote Eastern European country of Ludicra. But at least there’s a couple nicely ominous shots of a classic Hitchcock Staircase during the climactic scene, so it wraps up with a touch of cinematic flair.

Wisely, the director keeps the overall concept simple — the broiling psychological mother-daughter stew here has but a few ingredients, and the goal is for Chloe to make like the title from loony Diane. He isn’t reinventing the wheel, but he’s remarkably adept at fostering tension; he executes a terrific sequence where Chloe knots together extension cords and army-crawls out the window onto the roof with her cheeks full of water and… well, I won’t ruin it, but it’s scary and hilarious, and Allen shows she’s capable of a fully committed physical performance.

Chaganty doesn’t quite whisk all the tones together smoothly, but at least he knows that Preposterous Thrillers work best with an elbow in the ribs. He leans on his veteran star — because Paulson can do this type of stuff convincingly with one hand behind her back cradling a glass of cabernet — showcases Allen and doesn’t distract us or himself from the matter at hand: 90 minutes of nudge-wink suspense.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Run is an impressive exercise in ramping-up tension, pun mostly intended. There’s plenty here that’s entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny and lightly disturbing.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba .

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