Movie Preview: 'Run!' Starring Sarah Paulson

Run! That’s the title of a new horror thriller from the writer-director-producing team behind the inventive and exciting recent thriller Searching. That film used the innovative tactics of social media and webcams to create an engrossing and engaging thriller that featured a great performance from John Cho as a father using the tools of modern media to try to find his missing daughter.

Now comes Run(!) which stars a newcomer named Kiera Allen as Chloe, the, fair to say, sheltered, daughter of Diane, played by Sarah Paulson. One or both, mother or daughter, are going insane and Chloe specifically is seeing signs everywhere telling her to run away from her life which is dominated by the presence of Diane who acts as mother, teacher, best friend and captor to her wheelchair bound daughter.

All of that is gleaned from the film’s first trailer which studio, Lionsgate, dropped on Thursday, February 20th. The trailer announced the film’s release date which is, appropriately enough, Mother’s Day weekend, May 8th, 2020. The tagline for Run(!) further exploits the mother-daughter dynamic of the story with the creeptastic tagline “You can’t escape from a Mother’s Love.”

Here’s how Lionsgate describes the plot of Run! :

They say you can never escape a mother’s love... but for Chloe, that’s not a comfort — it’s a threat. There’s something unnatural, even sinister about the relationship between Chloe (newcomer Kiera Allen) and her mom, Diane (Sarah Paulson). Diane has raised her daughter in total isolation, controlling every move she’s made since birth, and there are secrets that Chloe's only beginning to grasp. From the visionary writers, producers and director of the breakout film Searching, comes a suspense thriller that shows that when mom gets a little too close, you need to RUN!

Run(!) is a darkly comic and ironic title for star Kiera Allen who is set to make history as the first wheelchair bound person to star in a major motion picture. Allen however, told EW.com that her disability does not define her casting or her performance. In conversation with director Aneesh Chaganty, Allen was aware that Chaganty wanted a person with a disability for the lead role in the movie but that the story is more organically told and doesn’t center upon her disability.

That said, the film is unquestionably groundbreaking which is becoming a hallmark for the team at Search Party Production, home of the aforementioned Searching, itself a groundbreaking experiment in film making. The trailer seems to indicate that Run (!) far less experimental than Searching and far more in the realm of a traditional thriller with lives on the line, terrifying violin strains on the soundtrack and genuine sense of discord and fear.

The trailer is solid enough though I do wish Hollywood would find some other way of demonstrating mental illness beyond a bad wig. Have you ever noticed that, people with mental health issues in Hollywood movies always have awful hairstyles, as if mental illness specifically affect a person’s ability to use a comb? Then again, bad hair tends to be how Hollywood demonstrates geography as well. Seems as if a character lives anywhere other than New York City or Los Angeles they are also hair afflicted. Perhaps we should invent a game for this, something like “Mentally or Midwesterner?”

That’s not to take anything away from Sarah Paulson whose an incredible actress regardless of the wig she is saddled with. Paulson rarely stops working and you can sense that in her immaculately crafted performances from American Horror Story to her upcoming series, Ratched, in which Paulson will portray the famed, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest character Nurse Ratched, before she met McMurphy.

Meanwhile, Run(!) arrives in theaters on Mother’s Day weekend, May 8th, 2020.