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

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 offness. 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.

Stream Run on Hulu