Capsule: Run!
What If Somebody Did SAW but, Y’Know, Like, Better?
Three strangers stalk each other in the middle of the Somewhere Desert. There’s the Runner (Jeremy Miller) whose wife and former sibling-in-arms (Alena von Stroheim) has been kidnapped and is slowly bleeding out after a finger has been severed; a marksman (Les Feltmate) whose own wife was killed for mysterious reasons; and a psycho in a bondage plague mask (Benjamin Watt), just fresh from a terminal encounter with the Runner’s sister-in-law. They have been set upon each other by a verbose dude masquerading as a preacher (Kevin Muster), who observes them by drone and who claims to have set this all up to teach the victims some sort of obscure lesson about love.
Run! wears its Saw heart on its sleeve, complete with extended pontifications by preacher-man and a franchise-teasing cliffhanger ending. The franchise may not manifest – that the film is going straight to VOD does not auger well – but that doesn’t mean that writers/directors Bill Brennenstuhl and Paul Stenerson haven’t conjured up a dark, skeevy little bit of intense action/horror. In spite of a digital production that doesn’t do them any favors, a constantly roving camera, color-coded photography, an intriguing disrupted timeline, and plenty of splooshy violence succeed in creating an atmosphere of off-kilter dread.
Logic seems less the point here (at the end, the preacher lays out his machinations, but I’m still not sure I understand) than just a full-on plunge into unrelenting nightmare, complete with creepy side-characters and grungy settings. But the theme of testing people’s love in a barren arena of life-and-death is more compelling than any of Saw’s Irony 101 torture scenarios – I’ll take the emotional resonance over simple sadism any day. Run! may be a bit more ambitious – both in production and text – than its creators can handle, but their swing for the fences makes it a helluva watch.