CIFF 2022 | ‘Runner’ review: Stuffy, thankless Midwestern pretentiousness
Who knew first love could be so bland?
Darren Houle and Hannah Schiller in “Runner.” Photo courtesy of Easy Riders.
Haas (Hannah Schiller) is a newly-bereaved 18-year-old tasked with delivering her father’s remains to his rural Illinois hometown to be cremated. She has barely taken her first step off the train and onto rough prairie grass when a supporting character tells her to walk to an inn several miles away through deserted countryside, because her father’s funeral must be postponed due to an inclement weather forecast. To add insult to injury, these lines are delivered in possibly the most stilted mannerisms ever committed to film. This would be fine if “Runner” was a Yorgos Lanthimos film, except it’s not, and this lack of emotion or empathy is no different from anything else we’ve been made to watch for the past 20 minutes.
It is only about halfway through the film’s 78-minute (!) runtime that Haas meets Will (Darren Houle), a man who has moved to Illinois to work and support his parents back home. I say “man” because we are never quite told how old Will is, and it doesn’t help that he looks more than twice the age that Haas is supposed to be. After a passionless meet-cute involving a gratingly squeaky bike, Haas and Will form a burgeoning attachment to each other, and then…
Nothing. No real emotion, no uptick in the narrative. Just… nothing.
I wish I was joking. I wish there was something to spoil, something that I could, and should, keep under wraps, since it is bad practice for reviewers to discuss spoilers without a warning. But there isn’t. We get some one-sided phone calls, some pointless humming, plenty of confounding dialogue delivered in thick Midwestern drawls, and lots of beautifully-framed scenes that you can hardly see due to the film being hell-bent on maintaining its shadowy, grey and beige colour palette even at the cost of visual clarity.
Dullness aside, “Runner” boasts some great views of austere landscapes and cinematography akin to Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed.” There is a particularly smart sequence in which a Greek chorus of onlookers assembles around Haas’s house to gossip about her recent tragedy. This is all well and good until we hit the halfway mark of the film without seeing much more than stationary wide shots of the same house and, you guessed it, lots of running. While the ethos of making every frame a painting is admirable in and of itself, it’s hard not to question why “Runner” chooses to make every frame look like one of two paintings, and why those two paintings both look like badly colour-graded ripoffs of “American Gothic.”
“Runner” has been described as a film that “evokes the early impressionist cinema of Terrence Malick.” This came as a surprise to me, seeing as I’d say it resembles “The Tree of Life” more than any of the highlights in Malick’s filmography. That is to say, “Runner” is a film in which too little happens at too slow a pace, with occasional bursts of absurdity. There are only so many films that can incorporate cryptic, inane writing akin to the plastic bag monologue from “American Beauty,” paired with lifeless performances, for so long and make it work. This is not one of those films. Dim, sluggish, and stale, this is a film that will make you want to run … out of the cinema mid-screening.
But hey, at least it looks nice … if grey and beige are your favourite colours.
“Runner” receives its U.S. premiere at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival on October 17, 2022.
