A sinisterly derelict shed on the Waikerie contains a locked cupboard you don’t want to go near. There are a few startling images in the movie’s back half that suggest a different movie entirely, and one horror fans would like to go to. But they’re just that, with little substance. Plenty of jump scares featuring a glowering girl with long black hair in a tatty nightgown, just out of focus in the background, or flashes of blood-slathered hands or nightmares that culminate in over-the-top crashing sound design deliver “gotcha” moments. Snook and Latorre operate on a similar plane here, as Sarah starts to really flip, and we wonder if what she’s seeing is real or imagined or some supernatural machination. “Run Rabbit Run” Sarah Enticknap/Courtesy of Sundance Institute Here’s where memories of “The Babadook” creep in, as in fellow Aussie Jennifer Kent’s film, we felt a stinging sympathy for its lead’s increasing ambivalence toward motherhood as her child became, well, really freaking annoying. Mia, in a preternaturally impressive performance by the young Latorre, has grown ferociously willful toward her mother, hurling barbs at Sarah, calling her a “terrible person,” and subjecting her to outbursts that would test even the most patient mother’s temperament. So what better to do than relive traumas from the past to hopefully extinguish the new ones? Joan, who after a family visit to the nursing home now calls Mia “Alice” too, has left the place uncannily intact from when Sarah was a kid. How that makes sense as a means to quelling looming, unquenchable dread, well, that’s just one of the movie’s many lazy screenwriting detours left unexplained.

Those secrets coalesce into a shaky schematic silhouette of a picture in the movie’s second half, where Sarah inexplicably drags Mia to her childhood home in rural Waikerie. Sarah pores over them late into the night, worrying over a large glass of wine and dialing up her ex and his new wife, accusing them of poisoning Mia’s mind by spilling secrets of Sarah’s past. These images are less cliched (and become more instructive later) than what inevitably becomes the dominating visual motif of Sarah and Mia’s breakdowns - which is, you guessed it, creepy scratch drawings of stick figures with eyes and limbs clawed off made by Mia at school. Another creature takes on insidious allegorical power, as in one scene, Sarah runs over a large bird, barely noticed it herself until Mia calls attention to the accident, and then can’t seem to find the bird beneath the car.

Chaos sarah bailey