Sometimes the weekend passes in a string of movies – not even very good ones. That was the case this past weekend as the wife and I fell down a Netflix rabbit hole (so to speak – around these we also consumed the final season of Disenchanted, of which I’ll have more to say later). I suppose a 1 out of 3 average isn’t bad from a baseball stat point of view, even if the one is more of a bloop single than anything more impressive.

Spoilers ahoy! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Run Rabbit Run (2023)

Sarah Snook (Shiv Roy of Succession fame – who knew she was Australian?) stars as a mother, Sarah, struggling with a troubled daughter, Mia, in the overlong, but often creepy, horror flick. In the wake of Sarah’s father’s death, Mia starts to behave strangely, insisting on meeting her grandmother she’s never seen before, and referring to herself by a different name – Alice, the name of Sarah’s long “lost” sister. Things proceed from there, usually because Sarah makes the worst possible decision at any given opportunity until she and Mia are holed up in a rural farmhouse where bad things continue to happen.

The deep mystery here is what happened to Alice, who appears to be possessing Mia. We’re never given any even implausible mechanism for this to happen, by the way. We know Sarah had some part in what happened to Alice because she’s haunted by guilt. Eventually we find out why – she pushed her sister off a cliff. Not by accident, not in a fit of passing rage. Nope, she just flat out murdered her sister. This is an odd narrative choice as is zaps any sympathy we have for Sarah, to the point that when we see Alice walking Mia toward the cliff you almost think justice might be done.

As I said, the movie is about a half hour too long. To its credit, it does maintain creepy vibes the whole time and the actress playing Mia does a good job of making her stand out in a film world flooded with odd, creepy children (although she’s not the best of the weekend – which is saying something). Snook is good, too, but the whole thing really doesn’t amount to much in the end.

As an aside, Sarah’s ex-husband (and Mia’s father) is played by Damon Herriman who will forever in my head by Dewey Crowe from Justified and manages to turn up in just about everything Australian I see these days.

In the Shadow of the Moon (2019)

I thought this flick had a pretty decent idea behind it – a cop tracks a serial killer over decades because they only strike every nine years. Cool! What I didn’t realize until we actually started watching this is that less than a detective story this was a half-baked fantasy story (the “science” nodded at is too silly to really call it sci-fi) with some appalling ethics at the core of it.

All that would go down better if the actual stuff on screen was actually better. Nothing particularly works, from the setup (why start the main character off as a beat cop who wouldn’t have anything to do with detective work and the, just as quickly, kick him off the force?) to the writing to the acting (Boyd Holbrook was much better in Justified: City Primeval, even if he was overshadowed by the return of Boyd Crowder in the last ten minutes) to the laughable explanation for all this (it involves time travel and the moon – seriously).

With all that said, it could have been kind of a fun lark if it hadn’t trampled all over one of the classic historical “what if?”s – if you could go back and strangle the infant Hitler in his crib, would you? It’s a thorny ethical dilemma, since at that point infant Hitler is completely innocent and hasn’t done anything to anybody – doesn’t that make it straight up murder (maybe Sarah could push him off a cliff?)? And even if you did it, would it make a difference, or were the forces at work in Weimar Germany of a sort that the Nazis would have seized power anyway?

This movie jettisons all those thorny ethical issues in favor of brute force – in order to prevent a right-wing militia group from bombing Philadelphia in 2024 and starting a new civil war, the killer is travelling back in time (to 1988, at least) to kill the bombers as children. Wait, no, that might make some sense. Rather, the killer is going back and murdering everybody on the mailing list of the predecessor organization of the group who committed the bombing. Not only have they not actually done anything when killed, they had decades in which to recognize the error of their ways!

It’s as if you took Minority Report and stripped out of it any issues of free will, determinism and whether we can punish people for something they might do. It’s just dumb, on multiple levels.

Vivarium (2019)

Well, at least Vivarium was interesting, if not particularly successful in the end.

A couple (Imogen Poots & Jesse Eisenberg) looking to buy a home is shown to a weirdo mono-chrome suburb that looks like something out of a Wes Anderson movie that’s seen better day by completely off-putting real estate agent. While they’re looking at the house, purely out of formal obligation, the agent slips away, leaving them stuck in the place. Why can’t they leave? Probably the same reason the dinner guests can’t leave in The Exterminating Angel – it’s surrealism, baby!

After their failed escape attempt (the couple always returns to the same house, number 9 – subtle Beatles reference, perhaps?), the couple settles into a weird routine that’s punctuated by boxes full of “food” and other supplies showing up in the street. One day the box contains what looks like an infant human child, but it’s quickly clear that it isn’t. It grows rapidly, screeches horrifically when it’s hungry, and can mimic the voices of its “parents” in completely unsettling ways (if this kid ever hooks up with Mia we are all fucked).

Ennui and horror ensue from there, but without any particular payoff. Poots takes on the unwilling role as mother to the child-beast, while Eisenberg starts digging a hole in the yard, returning to it day after day for fruitless labor. In the end they die, the child-beast grows up, and winds up replacing the original real estate agent in luring in a new pair of victims. Apparently this is all a sci-fi (they’re aliens?) riff on brood parasitism, in which species rely on others to raise their young. OK, I guess, but that gloss kind of ruins the ability of the film to actually be about anything larger regarding the human condition (I don’t think the standard “suburbia sucks and destroys your soul” angle really works, given that the couple didn’t choose to remain and weren’t seduced into it – they were just trapped).

Last week I talked about art that made me just go “what the fuck?” as having value. At least Vivarium gave me that. It’ll stick in my head for a while in a way that the other two won’t. Doesn’t mean I’d recommend it, but at least it’s weirdly interesting in its own way.

Keep in mind – taste is personal, your mileage may vary, etc.