Although it’s often considered straight and narrow, horror is a diverse genre. From psychological horror to slasher and more, there are many varieties. Run Rabbit Run, starring Sarah Snook and directed by Daina Raid, falls more into the former psychological horror category. However, it’s deliciously mixed with the one traditional horror element everyone loves- possession.
But is it possession or imagination?
The Succession alum plays a fertility doctor, Sarah, who has a 7-year-old daughter named Mia. For single mother Sarah, her daughter is her whole world. Both of them live peaceful lives, but one day, things change when Mia develops an obsession with someone who doesn’t exist. So what happens to the little girl in the end?
The film, Run Rabbit Run, implies that Mia is dead at the end when Alice walks with her towards the cliff, while Sarah looks helplessly from behind a window. It’s also possible that the ending scene is a manifestation of Sarah’s guilt for killing her sister, Alice. She punishes herself by thinking/ hallucinating Alice taking away the one person she loves the most- her daughter.
Run Rabbit Run Synopsis
To understand the ending of Run Rabbit Run, it’s essential to understand the film’s core themes and overall plot. The film deals with motherhood, sibling rivalry, and intergenerational trauma among women. Single mother Sarah and her 7-year-old daughter Mia share a strong bond.
But this changes when Mia finds a rabbit and insists on keeping it. Sarah isn’t too happy about it but allows her daughter to keep the animal as a pet. After her seventh birthday, Mia starts exhibiting strange behaviors.
For instance, she says she misses her grandmother Joan, whom she hasn’t met before.
Sarah is weirded out but doesn’t overthink it and takes Mia to visit her mother when she insists too much. It turns out Joan hasn’t yet met Mia because she lives in hospice care due to her dementia. However, it’s also implied that Sarah is estranged from her mother after her father’s death.
But the meeting doesn’t go well between grandmother and granddaughter. Whether due to her dementia or something else, Joan refers to Mia as Alice, Sarah’s missing sister. When Mia sees a childhood photo of her mother with Alice, she claims it is her standing with her mom. This is the beginning, and things only escalate from here.
Mia insists she’s her mother’s long-missing sister, which strains her relationship with Sarah. What makes matters worse is that Mia insists that Joan and not Sarah is her mother. But what is the truth about Alice? Who is she?
Run Rabbit Run Ending: Is Mia Dead?
One day, Sarah brings Mia to the home she grew up in. There it’s revealed that Alice isn’t just missing but dead as well. She died when she was seven years old because she was killed by her sister Sarah who had hit her with a rabbit trap. This murder gets revealed during an imaginary scuffle between Sarah and Alice in the barn.
Mia seemingly watches this enactment and flees as Sarah calls after her while being injured herself. Later on, Sarah apologizes to Mia and speaks to her as if she’s Alice. She apologizes for killing her. But Mia calls her mother a monster.
Sarah accepts this. But all’s not right in the end. When she wakes up the following day, she finds Mia and Alice walking to the cliff from where Sarah had pushed her sister to her death.
Sarah looks on helplessly and bangs the window as the screen goes black. So the question is- Is Mia dead? The movie doesn’t give a clear answer but certainly hints at that conclusion. However, the ending isn’t that simple. Throughout the film, some moments show that many of the incidents aren’t real and are manifestations of Sarah’s guilt over killing her sister.
For example, Sarah obsesses over multiple wounds and head injuries of Mia, only to find that her daughter never got such damages.
However, the place Sarah imagines the scars is where her sister bled after she had been hit with the rabbit trap by her.
In fact, her overprotectiveness over her daughter likely stems as a form of overcompensation for her heinous deed. So even though Sarah thinks that she has injured or hurt her daughter, she never actually does. It’s a manifestation of her guilt. As such, the ending scene of Alice taking away Mia could also be her imagination.
Another way to decipher the ending is by looking at it thematically. One question is- why does Sarah bang helplessly on the window when she can run outside to stop Alice from taking her daughter? It could mean that as a parent, she is watching her daughter move further away from her after she confessed her violent act of murdering her sister.
So there’s nothing that she can do about it because, in a way, Mia now feels closer or more sympathetic to Alice.
But does the entire incident happen on a psychological plane of Sarah? Or did Alice possess Mia? There are times in the film when Mia really speaks like Alice.
For example, when Mia is in her mother’s childhood home, she tells Sarah she doesn’t like playing with her because she locks her up. As the audience, we know Sarah has never locked up Mia, but she did lock up her sister. So maybe the ending is meant to be taken literally as a sign that Alice is taking the only person most precious to her as punishment for killing her.
Overall, the interpretation of the ending depends on which idea the viewer subscribes to. But for a film that blurs the line between reality and imaginary so much, it would be a bit foolish to subscribe only to the literal interpretation of Mia’s death in the end.
The text hints that Mia isn’t dead, just her relationship with her mother has been strained to the point of death. Or at least that’s what Sarah thinks because we never see Mia’s point of view in the end.
Run Rabbit Run is streaming on Netflix.
So what do you think of the ending of Run Rabbit Run?
Is Mia really dead? Or is Sarah just imagining her daughter died as a form of payment by Alice? Did Sarah hurt her daughter like her sister, or is that firmly her imagination too?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
4 Comments
@gennifer-
My closed captions didn’t say Robert. I thought it was Mia immediately. And having Alice walk beside Mia solidified it.
But I’m on google trying to see if that was a correct assumption haha. So I don’t know if im right and this did leave a bit too many unanswered questions.
I can’t find an explanation for who the person lying face down on the bed is either. It looks like an adult body to me, not a child body, so it didn’t even occur to me it was supposed to be Mia. That’s it is Mia does make the most sense though. Allison, Sarah’s ex is Peter, not Robert. My understanding of the final scene is that Mia is dead and Alice is accompanying her to the other side. Perhaps Sarah discovered Mia dead in the bed before going to the window.
To Allison: glad you noticed that person as well. I have been trying to find an article that explains that person and couldn’t. On Facebook, there are a few that watched it with the CC running and it says “Robert snoring” implying it was her ex that had stayed there, not Mia. This ending is more confusing than I would like. I don’t mind leaving some things to your own conclusion, but this left too many unanswered questions that it felt like I ended the movie on the cliff myself. Who was that person? Were they dead or alive (pillow is over their head)? Did the mom kill both Mia and her father? Did she kill either one of them? Did Mia really say and do the things implied or were those hallucinations too? If so, Mia had to be very confused about her mom. At one point she asked her ex how Mia knows about Alice. Maybe through those hallucinations, the mom was telling her without realizing it. Again, way too many questions left unanswered.
When Sarah wakes up to discover Mia impeding you can clearly see Mia lying on her stomach on the other bed in the room with a pillow over her head. Therefor Sarah is hallucinating seeing Mia and Alice walking towards the cliff.