Motherly love turns sinister in this chilling trailer for Run

I have a feeling that most of you reading this have not seen Searching. That is something you need to rectify posthaste. The 2018 thriller starring John Cho took a relatively standard premise – a frantic father searching for his missing teenage daughter – and put a new spin on it by presenting the entire film through only the call/chat interactions on the father’s computer desktop and cellphone screen. It sounds hokey, but it ended up being brilliantly tense, groundbreaking stuff earning massive critical acclaim and scoring the limited-release film $75 million from just an $880 000 budget.

The person behind this success was Aneesh Chaganty, the Indian-American writer/director who transitioned into filmmaking after working at Google using Google Glass to shoot commercials. And the 29-year old filmmaker is now following up his breakout debut with a brand new thriller titled Run. There are no fancy tech gimmicks this time around though, just one seriously creepy mother (played by Golden Globe winner Sarah Paulson) and the very unhealthy relationship she has with her daughter. And that is enough to already give me chills.

Check it out below.

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.

Well, that looks all kinds of twisted and creepy. Collider visited the set of Run last year and spoke to newcomer Kiera Allen who plays Daughter. Yes, the character is simply called Daughter while Paulson’s is simply called Mother. That level of weirdness continues in the film as Allen explained:

Calling the character’s Mother and Daughter is really interesting because that’s the way they operate in this story is, it’s all about who they are to each other and to her, I’m Daughter and to me, she’s Mother.

But the relationship between Mother and Daughter, which is at the crux of the film, evolves in a really interesting way. There is a lot of suspicion and mistrust and secrecy and you never quite know what reality is. It’s kind of hard to get your footing in this movie and know what’s true or not and so that’s really interesting for me to play from the perspective of my character of not knowing quite what’s real and how much I can trust and what’s at stake.

Run is scheduled for release in the US on 8 May 2020 (yes, that’s Mother’s Day weekend), with further international rollouts happening thereafter. Hopefully, it reaches more screens than the criminally under-watched Searching did.

Last Updated: February 21, 2020