Run. (2020, Aneesh Chaganty) (Patreon)

55/100

Spoilers ahoy.

Watched this more or less the same way that I (long ago) read Grisham's The Firm: fully aware of its mediocrity in almost every important respect, but too curious about what might happen next not to continue. Granted, the broad strokes are fairly obvious—nothing here qualifies as a shocking twist—but there's a pleasing clockwork efficiency to the series of (sometimes literal) obstacles that our wheelchair-bound protag has to overcome en route to first uncovering the disturbing truth and then seeking to escape. Really wish there'd been stronger character work on the script level, allowing Paulson to go deeper than Psychopath Wearing A Mask Of Chipper Normalcy, but she does at least inhabit that shallowness to the delectable hilt. And Kiera Allen is a real find, though I feel as if the otherwise laudable decision to cast an actor with limited real-life mobility forced some minor script revisions. (Traditional climax would see Chloe, whose lower-limb paralysis has been engineered and shown slowly abating since she stopped taking "Trigoxin," kick her mom down the stairs. Chaganty even blocks it that way, moving Paulson directly in front of the wheelchair, before having cops shoot her instead. No reason he couldn't fake it via an insert, of course; I assume he chose not to have the character do anything that Allen can't. Which I respect. But a sudden boot, while predictable, would have been much more cheesily satisfying.) Pretty much a constant tug of war between effective suspense and risible [x]-from-hell absurdity, though I was able to rationalize some of the latter by thinking harder about it than a thriller like this should really require, e.g. I guess if you've been home-schooled your entire life, and have no friends, you might not be aware that colleges send out rejection letters as well as acceptance letters. Mostly I'm a sucker for just-shy-of-camp moments like the one in which Diane silently considers her next move and then proceeds to google "household neurotoxins." 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: I'd planned to ignore the period that follows the title when it first appears, since that (as well as the lowercase 'r,' though I generally ignore capitalization anyway) is a function of the word landing at the end of an onscreen definition of "paralysis." (Let's just ignore the fact that no such definition would bother to list the movements that a paralyzed individual can't perform.) The rest of the text vanishes and only "run." remains. That's clearly a stylistic choice, not an orthographic one. But then Chaganty repeats the title at the end, all by itself, capital 'R' this time...but still followed by a period! So he clearly wants it there. Okay by me.