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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’ 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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‘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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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

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 .

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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

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Run photos.

An isolated teen discovers her mother's sinister secret.

Rating: PG-13 (Language|Disturbing Thematic Content|Some Violence/Terror)

Genre: Mystery & thriller

Original Language: English

Director: Aneesh Chaganty

Producer: Natalie Qasabian , Sev Ohanian

Writer: Aneesh Chaganty , Sev Ohanian

Release Date (Streaming): Nov 20, 2020

Runtime: 1h 30m

Production Co: Lionsgate

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Sarah Paulson

Diane Sherman

Kiera Allen

Chloe Sherman

Onalee Ames

Crying Hands

Ted Sherman

Carter Heintz

Clark Webster

Conan Hodgkinson

Erik Athavale

Bradley Sawatzky

Obstetrician

Aneesh Chaganty

Screenwriter

Sev Ohanian

Natalie Qasabian

Hillary Spera

Cinematographer

Torin Borrowdale

Original Music

Jean-Andre Carriere

Production Design

Gary Barringer

Art Director

Sara McCudden

Set Decoration

Heather Neale

Costume Design

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‘Run’ Review: A Wheelchair-Using Teen Tries to Escape a Sadistic Caregiver in Wild Sarah Paulson Thriller

In low-budget debut 'Searching,' Aneesh Chaganty found clever solutions within constraints. For his follow-up, he builds a gripping action movie around a wheelchair user.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Sarah Paulson is either the world’s best mother or the worst in “ Run ,” a deranged (in a good way) two-hander from “Searching” director Aneesh Chaganty that piles one tragedy upon another and serves it up in the form of a thriller.

The first of these injustices is revealed in the opening scene: Paulson plays expectant mother Diane Sherman, whose only child is delivered prematurely, taken from her and hooked up to machines in a long-shot hope for its survival. The second emerges only gradually almost 17 years later, as Diane’s college-bound daughter, Chloe ( Kiera Allen ) — who’s dealt with diabetes, asthma and lower-body paralysis for as long as she can remember — starts to question whether her life could have gone a very different way.

Short answer: Yes. But Chloe is hardly prepared for the degree to which her reality has been meticulously constructed by Diane. And the film’s title, “Run,” suggests just how difficult escape will be for a young woman who, by design more than disability, has been confined to a wheelchair for the better part of her life. Like Stephen King’s “Misery,” the movie turns too much attention into a very uncomfortable thing, suggesting that “overprotective” can be a synonym for abuse.

“Chloe’s the most capable person I know,” Diane tells a group of fellow homeschoolers early on, and actor Allen (a wheelchair user in real life) bears that out in the role: Chloe lives an isolated existence, cut off from virtually all social interaction, but she’s bright and resourceful, as evidenced by the almost-operational robotics project she’s been building in her upstairs bedroom. To get downstairs, she relies on an automated lift, but in most other respects, Chloe can manage on her own. She is very nearly independent, and that’s something Diane clearly isn’t ready to accept. The same goes for Chloe’s college hopes, and the first clue audiences get that something’s not right is the hint that Diane might be intercepting the mail.

Popular on Variety

Certainly, there’s a lot more to her parenting than meets the eye, and Chaganty has some pretty good surprises up his sleeve — so stop reading now if you’re sensitive to spoilers. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that “Run” is the latest in a string of film and TV projects (e.g., “Sharp Objects” and “The Act”) dealing with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition by which a parent or guardian gets off on someone else’s disability, inventing ailments in others so that they might play the caregiver.

In Diane’s case, what she views as mother’s love relies on an elaborate deception, and Chloe finally starts to question the circumstances she takes for granted — confinement that amounts to a kind of house arrest and a daily dose of pills that may in fact be prolonging her condition — when she discovers a bottle of medicine in her mother’s grocery bag. It’s rare that Diane leaves anything unattended, and yet, Chloe’s snooping suggests that she’s probably been having doubts for some time. But how to investigate them when her mom seems to be monitoring everything, from her phone and internet use to the duration of her bathroom breaks? (In one of the film’s tensest scenes, she sneaks out of a movie, crosses to the pharmacy and demands to know what the new pills are. The answer is so much worse than she imagined.)

Arriving just two months after “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” spinoff “Ratched” on Netflix, “Run” seems almost subtle by comparison. It’s not subtle, mind you, but in the scheme of campy Paulson performances, this one registers as more nuanced, allowing Chaganty to get away with maintaining the mystery for longer. Instead of casting knowing looks that indicate her character’s true motives, Paulson assumes a poker face. What she’s doing is evil, and yet, like a great many real-world villains, she has managed to justify it to herself, which is perhaps the scariest aspect of all.

Whereas Chaganty’s “Searching” — which was told entirely through computer screens — kept audiences guessing till the very end, “Run” switches gears to a fairly routine thriller once the ruse is up. The family lives in a tiny town where everyone thinks of Diane as a super-mom, so Chloe’s options are limited in terms of where she can turn for help (and audiences don’t yet know how far Diane will go to maintain her control over her daughter). But of course, the biggest obstacle is Chloe’s handicap, which limits her mobility and leads to a number of unique sequences in which the character — and the performer playing her — maneuver with limited use of her legs.

It’s still fairly uncommon for Hollywood movies to include characters who use wheelchairs, and even rarer still for directors to cast actors with disabilities in those parts. How far things have come since “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” and the cliché of the helpless invalid at the mercy of her caregiver! And yet, the representation conversation is evolving so fast that one can imagine “Run” rubbing certain audiences the wrong way, whether today or in a few years, when the rules for who can play which roles have changed again.

Kiera Allen, who plays Chloe, represents a genuine discovery: funny, charismatic and in many ways more relatable than the Clearasil-commercial models who populate most teen flicks — which represents a second agenda, beyond mere authenticity. Between this and “Searching” (with its Asian American leads), Chaganty is actively expanding audiences’ ideas of what movie heroes can be. In the end, the character’s disability feels like an extension of the approach taken in his debut. Once again, perceived limitations become opportunities for more creative solutions, and differences disappear unless audiences decide to obsess over them.

Reviewed in Nightstream Film Festival (online), Los Angeles, Oct. 8, 2020. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 95 MIN.

Production: A Hulu release of a Lionsgate presentation and production. Producers: Natalie Qasabian, Sev Ohanian.
Crew: Director: Aneesh Chaganty. Screenplay: Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian. Camera: Hillary Spera. Music: Torin Borrowdale.
With: Sarah Paulson, Kiera Allen.

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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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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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Sarah Paulson’s a Terror in Tasteful Mom Garb in the Hulu Thriller Run

Sarah Paulson has the oval face of a marble Madonna and the fragile affect of someone whose outward show of serenity could at any moment collapse into teary hysteria or explode into rage. In a lot of her roles, she wears femininity as though it were a mask that’s always in danger of slipping and exposing more unruly, indelicate realities underneath. There’s a knowing quality to this approach, a self-awareness that lends itself well to camp, which is one of the reasons Paulson has been such a central presence in the Ryan Murphy Televisual Universe. In September, she starred in Ratched , the most recent byproduct of Murphy’s deal with Netflix, and a show with a premise better suited to a comedy sketch about the creatively bankrupt state of the prestige drama than a two-season order. But while giving an origin story to Nurse Ratched, the psych-ward tyrant in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , was both unasked for and an odd misunderstanding of the source material, the role, at least, fit Paulson like a latex medical glove. It was another opportunity to show how adept she is with characters who weaponize buttoned-down white womanhood and the expectations of propriety that accompany it — in this case, doling out violence with a smirk and an insistence that it’s for the recipient’s own good.

She’s adept enough, actually, to play the part of the malevolent angel of mercy twice in one year. In Run , the new film from Searching director Aneesh Chaganty , Paulson has again been cast as a caregiver whose displays of self-sacrificing assistance conceal some truly alarming shit. She’s Diane Sherman, a single mother whose life revolves around her daughter Chloe (newcomer Kiera Allen), a teen living with a slew of health issues — among them asthma, diabetes, partial paralysis — that are implied to be linked to a premature birth. The film walks us through Chloe’s morning routine of creams, pills, inhalers, blood-sugar-level tests, and leg stretches before showing her spending her days homeschooling and waiting for the mail, anxious for acceptance letters from colleges. It’s an isolated life, but the script, which Chaganty wrote with Sev Ohanian, is careful in laying out why Chloe doesn’t see it that way. Diane is the one who drives them into town, doesn’t let Chloe have a cell phone, and keeps the internet-enabled computer in the living room. But she’s doting, and if the comfortable two-story home in which the pair live is actually prison, it’s one whose bars Chloe has yet to bump up against.

And then Chloe discovers that the prescription bottle for one of her regular medications is not actually in her name, a small disruption that leads to the upending of her entire universe. It doesn’t take long for Run to swerve into being a thriller, one in which Chloe’s forced to question everything she’s taken for granted, including whether she’s really as sick as she’s been told and whether Diane has her best interests at heart. The film’s set pieces are scaled to its heroine’s minimal world and have varying degrees of success creating suspense from sequences of sneaking time on the landline and trying to escape a locked bedroom by crawling across the roof. In a rare, welcome bit of casting, Allen is, like the character she’s playing, a wheelchair-user, and the film is unfussy in its portrayal of Chloe’s disabilities and blessedly free from the ickiness that can come from watching an actor approach a disability like something that just makes a role riper. Allen acquits herself solidly, though it would have been nice if Chloe had been given traits beyond “plucky determination” and “liking STEM.” Run isn’t always a clever film, but it is a film in which the characters are clever, and it seems determined to avoid the kind of moments that leave you yelling at the screen in frustration about how terrible someone’s choices are. If it ultimately falls a bit flat, it might be because it’s all a little too sensible.

But then along comes Paulson, with a performance that goes from a barely perceptible simmer to an overflowing boil. Her Diane is a woman who speaks soothingly at support groups and puts a lot of time into her garden and who’s on fire on the inside the whole time about the prospect of not having someone totally dependent on her. The character’s ready with all sorts of reasonable explanations for Chloe’s growing questions, and when those fail, she wraps martyrdom around herself like chain mail, apologizing to the local pharmacist about how Chloe’s new medication has her acting out and tearily urging a would-be savior to “believe a mother when she tells you that her child is sick.” What’s frightening about Diane are not the lengths to which she goes, but how sincerely felt her deeply warped expression of love is — to the point where its recipient doesn’t actually matter, because the act of care is all that counts. Whenever Paulson is on screen, she gives Run a much-needed jolt of vitality as this Munchausen’s-by-proxy monster in catalog knitwear. Her character’s devotion is as terrible as it is unshakeable, but what makes the turn so enjoyable is that it’s grounded in something recognizable — a soul-deep dread of being abandoned, hidden under a nurturer’s smile.

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Merritt Wever and Domhnall Gleeson in Run

Run: a mystifyingly satisfying post-Fleabag romcom

Vicky Jones and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s ex-lovers-on-the-lam tale drops us in a no man’s land of delicious suspense

T he sheer Waller-Bridgeness of the reality we live in now means everything good in TV and film is either directly featuring or fine-tuned by Phoebe Waller-Bridge ( Fleabag , Killing Eve , Star Wars , Bond somehow), or inspired by her work [please self-insert an endless list of credits that basically feature everything produced in the year 2020, I’m not going to use up word count on writing it out myself]. This is a good thing, because it means a generation of spikily interesting shows with complicated characters and blunt-force wanking scenes, and the next of those off the conveyor belt is HBO’s Run (Wednesday, 9pm, Sky Comedy).

Run has the PWB hallmark, in that she both plays a character and executive produces (the series itself was written by Fleabag collaborator Vicky Jones ) and is a series where … Well, I’m actually reluctant to tell you what happens, because it unfurls in such a confusing, satisfying way, where every piece clicks together like a puzzle so that, for at least the first 20 minutes, and in my case deep into the first 70, you have no idea what’s going on. And that’s fantastic. It’s years since I’ve watched a TV show and, very truly, had no idea what was coming next. It feels as if you’re watching it after you’ve woken from a small coma, and you’re getting plot cues from obtuse tattoos you’ve given yourself all over your arms and legs.

The rough starting point of Run is: two former college sweethearts fulfil a 14-year pact and go on the run together across America (hence: “run”). Obviously, going on the run is more complicated than that, and that’s what makes Run so sticky and delicious – watching the various strands of real life butt up against their idyllic escape attempt like solid concrete; watching two people, scarred by 20s turbulence and early-30s reality, try to awaken the people they were when they were 19 and didn’t know what tax codes were; and watching the two leads, Domhnall Gleeson ’s Billy (Star Wars, The Revenant) and Merritt Wever’s Ruby (Unbelievable, Nurse Jackie) bounce off one another, simmering with chemistry. Run is told very much in the breathless now but also zips back into well-handled flashback moments to reveal how they ended up here, rubbing feet together in a grey hotel room. Structurally, that makes it like a romcom that has been forced to swallow a jet-black spoonful of reality: at times sweet, often sizzling with unresolved flirtation, occasionally just highly stressful.

In the wrong hands this would all fall flat – the characters would keep saying: “I can’t believe I did that! I can’t believe we went on the run together!” and every episode would end with a sinister phone call from the real world with a dun–dun drumbeat of dread – but Run has done something more bold-feeling: sketching the outline of the story, then filling in the details with colour later, at a pace that feels slow and deliberate and, crucially, interesting. Halfway through the first series, it’s impossible to tell whether you want Billy and Ruby to win, lose, or even whether you like the people they’ve become, and that’s a fascinating no man’s land to be stranded in. If this is the direction TV is going to go in, then cool. I’ll happily gobble up five more years of that.

The watcher
Phoebe Waller-Bridge

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.

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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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Run - Official Trailer

Who are the actors in 'Run'? 'Run' star cast includes Sarah Paulson, Pat Healy, Kiera Allen and Onalee Ames.
Who is the director of 'Run'? 'Run' is directed by Aneesh Chaganty.
Who is the producer of 'Run'? 'Run' is produced by Sev Ohanian.
What is Genre of 'Run'? 'Run' belongs to 'Horror,Mystery,Thriller' genre.
In Which Languages is 'Run' releasing? 'Run' is releasing in English.