Run Rabbit Run: The Real-Life Inspiration Behind The Sarah Snook Thriller

Netflix is dipping its toe back into the horror genre with "Run Rabbit Run," and as it turns out, there's a very unsettling true story behind this eerie screenplay. Adelaide-based author Hannah Kent, who penned the original screenplay for the thriller that stars Sarah Snook as a mother struggling with her child's disturbing behavior, said that a documentary about a real-life event similar to the story served as inspiration.

According to an interview with InReview, Kent saw a documentary about a young boy from Glasgow, Scotland who kept describing his other mother and former home to his actual mom. "She just put it down to kids saying the strange things that they sometimes do," Kent said. "However, as time progressed, his desire to go back to this house became even more acute. He was homesick, he missed his other family – and he was able to add a lot more detail about the place where he said he had been living."

The big twist here came when the boy correctly located his home from a "previous life" on the small island of Barra off the Scottish coast — and not only that, but the house he identified looked exactly like the one he'd described in detail. So how did this inspire "Run Rabbit Run," and what is Netflix's newest thriller about?

In case you haven't checked it out yet — and you don't mind being spoiled — here's the lowdown on "Run Rabbit Run." Snook's character, also named Sarah, lives in a small seaside town in Australia and is doing her best as a single mom, even though her kid is... frankly, acting really weird. Adding to all of that, Sarah's elderly mother is suffering from dementia, a fact Sarah seems to be trying to avoid. Mia (Lily LaTorre), Sarah's daughter, keeps saying odd stuff like "I miss people I've never met all the time," in reference to the grandmother she hasn't met. 

When the two do meet, Sarah finds herself totally unnerved when her seemingly confused mother Joan (Greta Scaachi) calls Mia the wrong name, referring to her as "Alice," which happens to be the name of Sarah's long-dead sister. Mia, on the other hand, takes to the name quickly and starts making her mother call her Alice instead of Mia, all while we, the audience, wonders what even happened to Alice in the first place and what the heck is going on with Mia.

So how does this upsetting story resolve as Sarah grows more and more frightened of her own daughter, who seems to have taken on a new life as Alice? She's taking that entire thing very far, wearing Alice's clothes and scaring her mom, while Sarah starts to lose her grip on reality, even hallucinating in the process. Mia also keeps showing up with head injuries, not explaining what happened to cause them. Soon, though, we find out exactly what happened to Alice — and Mia — thanks to one of Sarah's visions.

Seemingly recalling her childhood, Sarah sees Alice emerge from a locked cupboard during a game of hide and seek gone wrong, at which point Sarah attacks Alice with a rabbit trap and the two race to the edge of a nearby cliff... where Sarah pushes Alice to her death. When Sarah wakes up from this, she finds Mia gone — and when she does find her daughter, the ghost of Alice is also present. Clearly, Sarah has repressed the fact that she killed Alice, and Mia, a young girl at the same age Alice was during this horrible event, is bringing her trauma to the surface. At the very end, the audience and Sarah watches as Mia, holding hands with the ghostly Alice, walks towards the cliff, as Sarah lets out a gut-wrenching scream.

If you're a fan of "Succession" or have paid any attention to the news lately, you're probably at least a little familiar with Sarah Snook, who just recently wrapped up a triumphant four season run on the hit HBO drama. Snook starred alongside Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, Alan Ruck, and Brian Cox, among many others, as Siobhan "Shiv" Roy, the youngest sibling in the uber-powerful Roy family and the only girl amongst her brothers Kendall (Strong), Roman (Culkin), and the oft-forgotten Connor (Ruck). They're all anchored by their domineering father Logan (Cox), who's either yelling at Shiv or affectionately calling her "Pinky," and Shiv also has an ally (sometimes) in her husband, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen). 

Snook will likely be a major Emmy contender this season after a tour-de-force performance in "Succession's" fourth and final season, which aired earlier this year, and she's got other projects in the pipeline as well. Later this year, she'll star alongside Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks in "The Beanie Bubble," a comedy about the Beanie Babies craze, and she'll return to the stage in a one-woman production of "The Portrait of Dorian Grey" in 2024. If you want to check out her performance in "Run Rabbit Run," it's streaming on Netflix now.