‘Runner’: San Sebastian Review

Dir: Marian Mathias. US/Germany/France. 2022. 76 mins.  

It’s always laudable when a film-maker manages to construct a coherent self-enclosed world that operates entirely according to its own laws. That’s the case with US director director Marian Mathias’s feature debut Runner, an enigmatic, semi-surreal coming-of-age story set in the American Midwest. But the film feels too claustrophobic to really engage on anything other than a level of overcast, solemn hallucination. Mathias has a confident way of creating strong, eerie images, but nothing here feels quite new enough to offset the oppressively lugubrious mood. While Mathias may find future outlets for exploring her distinctive worldview and stylistics, it’s hard to imagine this particular creation flourishing after its Toronto and San Sebastian screenings.

Runner is an eerie proposition, less narrative than poetic and built on repetitions of particular motifs

The film takes place in a strange sort of non-time. The period may be a few decades back, judging from the hats, trains and telephones, and the vintage country music on the soundtrack; or it may be an alternative, stylistically distanced version of today, it’s hard to tell. The protagonist is 18-year-old Hannah (Hannah Schiller), known to her father as Haas, which she explains means ‘rabbit’ (in fact, ‘hare’ in Dutch) or ‘runner’. She lives with her dad Alvin (Jonathan Eisley) in a crumbling house perched on the horizon on a perpetually overcast stretch of plain, the only other local landmarks being a church, a bleak drinking den, and a long stretch of railway, from which trains emit plaintive passing howls.

Alvin – of whose mental state someone remarks, “his roof wasn’t nailed tight” – is obsessed with selling a seemingly imaginary collection of houses by the Mississippi, and when he’s not muttering about them late at night, he’s pestering the local priest about them – until he falls down the staircase and dies. It’s left to Haas to get her father buried, so she transports the coffin to his native Illinois – where the plains are all but identical to her place of departure.

Haas checks into a boarding house run by a wheezy codger named Baggy (Gene Jones), who mainly sits watching old black-and-white movies on TV. Heavy rains soon make the earth too sodden for a burial, but in the meantime, Haas meets a quietly solicitous young man named Will (Darren Houle). They enter into a taciturn closeness, riding bicycles and venturing into the landscape to gaze at flights of geese, until it’s time for Will to take up a job aboard a riverboat, and for Haas to return home. 

Runner is an eerie proposition, less narrative than poetic and built on repetitions of particular motifs: Haas lying awake at night; the rhythmic scraping of mud from boots; and, the film’s strongest image, locals stepping into the frame to surround her house and offer commentary like a Greek chorus. There are a few notable events, but they’re so fleeting that they’re more like micro-events: e.g. a desultory punch thrown in the bar.

Elegantly-composed images stand out with imposing formality – Haas’s hands clasped behind her back, a landscape seen Searchers-style from the open door of a train carriage, and those various houses all perched on horizons, seemingly adrift amid a rural void, in the manner of Andrew Wyeth paintings. Overall, the mood suggests a depressive Terrence Malick. For most of the time, Schiller’s role doesn’t require her to do much more than scowl, or stomp doggedly along country roads, and as her father, Eisley essentially plays a wild-eyed, babbling weirdbeard of the sort that’s only too familiar from numerous versions of modern American gothic.

Among the cast, young Darren Houle comes out best, his basso monotone delivery conveying a dreamer’s empathetic tenderness. The sound design – wind, train whistles, household creaks - is one of the film’s stronger suits, with French musician Para One, known for his Céline Sciamma collaborations, adding chilly ambient electronics. Country songs from the Glaser Brothers and Hank Williams bolster the feel of an antique, windblown America that you might entertain in your melancholy dreams, but that you really wouldn’t want to visit.