Run - Movie review

How much I’d recommend it: 7/10

Complete plot w/ spoiler:
This is a really creepy movie. Set in small-town Pasco, Washington, a mother and her 17-year old homeschooled daughter (Chloe) are living together, preparing Chloe for college. She has her sights set on attending the University of Washington in Seattle. Every day, she eagerly checks the mail for a decision letter but her mom always beat her to the mailman and tells her she’ll let her know if anything comes. Chloe, by the way, is paralyzed from the waist down so is confined to a wheelchair and has a host of other medical issues including diabetes so she is on a cocktail of drugs.

As the movie goes on, we see more and more signs of how controlling the mother is. The mail situation and homeschooling situation being the first signs of her attempts to isolate Chloe from the world. One day, Chloe finds a new drug in her mom’s grocery bag but it’s prescribed to her, not Chloe. She asks some questions and the mom gets dodgy. She tries to do some research but the house internet has been disconnected. She goes so far as to go to the town pharmacy and ask the pharmacist about it. She finds out it is a medication for dogs that numbs their legs. For some reason, Chloe’s mom has been giving her this medication.

Things get progressively stranger. Chloe finds herself locked in her room from which she manages to escape. The mailman sees her in her wheelchair on the road and stops to help. Soon, her mom pulls up and injects the mailman with something that causes him to pass out. Later, we see her dragging his body through the house, presumably to dispose of it. She now locks Chloe in the basement. Chloe finds a bunch of strange articles and photos including one of herself at age 5, standing! She had thought she was paralyzed since birth. She also finds a death certificate with her name on it saying she only lived 2 hours. And finally, spoiler alert if I haven’t already spoiled too much, she finds a newspaper article detailing a young couple who’s newborn baby was abducted from the hospital on the same day as Chloe’s death certificate.

After discovering this, Chloe’s mom soon comes down to the basement and pleads with her that she can forget about all this and go back to how things were. Chloe’s not having it and manages to escape into a closet where she finds shelves full of unknown drugs and chemicals that her mom has been feeding her for years. Right as her mom breaks the door to the closet, Chloe ingests a poison and passes out. She wakes up in the hospital. She is being treated as a suicide attempt so mom isn’t able to talk with her until a psychiatrist has evaluated her. The mom sneaks off and suddenly a patient dies in another room triggering a code blue and causing all the staff so run out. The mom then is seen rushing Chloe through the UW Medicine hospital to get her out of there. She is stopped by security at the top of escalator where she pulls a gun and is shot, causing her to tumble down the escalator.

In the last scene of the movie, it’s 7 years later and we see an older, now married Chloe visiting a high-security prison. She goes in to visit her mom on a hospital bed. She is emaciated and appears to be dying. In the very final scene, Chloe removes a small baggie with the same pills we saw earlier, the dog numbing ones, and says something like “time for your medication, mom.” And the movie ends.

Thoughts:
Really enjoyed this film. Sarah Paulson plays the mom and nails the role. She is the perfect creepy, sneaky character having played Nurse Ratchet and various characters in American Horror Story. As a UW alum myself, it was fun to see Chloe’s obsession with going to UW throughout the movie and finally ending up in the UW hospital. The twists and turns of the movie were captivating and well worth the watch.