Dir: Paul Raschid. With: Roxanne McKee, George Blagden, Dario Argento, Franco Nero. 90 mins. Cert: 15
The 32-year-old writer-director Paul Raschid is surely too young to recall the multiple endings of 1985’s Clue and those hotly traded Choose Your Own Adventure books; perhaps subsequent, digitised RPGs left this filmmaker with his penchant for interactive cinema. Either way, intrepid souls heading to Whitechapel’s Genesis between now and New Year will once more take up glowsticks to determine their path through the woods of Raschid’s latest horror-thriller. Again, The Run demands split-second judgement calls one may not be accustomed to making slumped under a half tonne of popcorn. Again, there’s a 50/50 possibility you won’t get what you vote for; as our own Phil Hoad wrote of Raschid’s 2022 endeavour The Gallery, this feels an appositely post-Brexit format.
The path here is literal: we’re redirecting fitness influencer Zanna (Roxanne McKee) as she circles Lake Garda on what proves an eventful morning jog. Further synopsis would inevitably be provisional, but the interactive element begins with some light stretches – choices of music or podcast while running, and whether to greet passing locals – before turning existential as our heroine attracts masked pursuers. As your Guardian correspondent, I was both contractually and constitutionally bound to propose kindness wherever possible, but my lively Saturday night crowd chose anarchy at most junctures, yielding several chastening false starts and dead ends. Again, each audience’s mileage will vary; I will say that, collectively, we just about got what we deserved.
As a 21st century artefact, The Run can seem clunky: there’s still scope for Raschid to tighten the cause-and-effect, and some of his dialogue feels rough-edged when not purely functional. As an experience, it falls somewhere between uncommonly adaptable test screening and dropping by a R&D lab (or friendly D&D game). An athletic McKee makes her big moments count as the one character who comes into closest focus; huntsman Franco Nero and priest Dario Argento lurk in dispatches. Unlike some of the technological deviations now plaguing us, this one does feel hand-turned and human-derived, its narrative crowdsourced by definition. Any bad losers can always return the following night and make better informed choices – not least profiling their fellow voters going in.
The Run is now playing at the Genesis, Whitechapel.
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