Runner

Runner

VERDICT: Writer-director Marian Mathias celebrates small acts of kindness and empathy in her opaque but haunting debut feature.

Set against the vast lonely backdrop of the American Midwest, Runner is a minor-key indie drama about the kindness of strangers. The feature debut of New York-based Marian Mathias, its chief allure is a kind of austere beauty, peopling mournfully empty landscapes with stoical, emotionally withdrawn characters. Slight and disjointed, this minimalist coming-of-age drama feels at times like a work-in-progress sketchbook of embryonic scenes and half-formed themes intended for a more substantial film. Even so, it has a strong visual aesthetic and a haunting emotional force that belies its lean plot and compact running time.

Shot in Indiana, but seemingly set in Missouri and Illinois, Runner takes place in a vague time period somewhere between the late 1940s and late 1970s. It could almost be frontier-era America with its stark wooden houses, antique train carriages and dimly lit saloons, a time before billboards or shopping malls or ubiquitous TV screens. In interviews, Mathias has confirmed she gave the film a purposely “atemporal” setting. Fresh from its Toronto world premiere, the film made its European festival debut in San Sebastian this week, earning a special jury mention. Beyond festival and art-house circles, interest will be slender for this opaque, low-voltage character study, but Mathias shows ample promise and technical skill.

Hannah (Hannah Schiller, engaging but elusive) is a shy, solitary 18-year-old nicknamed “Haas” by a German relative, which loosely translates as “hare” or “rabbit”. She shares a remote wooden house perched on a vast heartland plain with her widowed father Alvin (Jonathan Eisley), a man of fragile mental health and eccentric habits, including property investment plans that sound deeply dubious and probably imaginary. When he dies suddenly in a mundane domestic accident, Hannah is suddenly forced to reckon with Alvin’s backlog of debts, and faces imminent foreclosure on their house. But first, she has to transport his body by train back to Illinois for burial in his native soil.

When the funeral is delayed by heavy rain, Hannah is obliged to lodge a few days in a rooming house run by Baggy (Gene Jones), who spends all day watching vintage black and white movies, but seems barely able to cope with real human company. Only after a brief encounter with soft-spoken Will (Darren Houle), another lost soul fleeing family issues in the Midwest, does Hannah begins to emerge from her shell. The pair strike up a hesitant friendship with a hint of innocent flirtation, depicted here in dreamy fragments: bicycle rides, wordless rural wanderings, bonding over vintage Hank Williams songs. A more conventional film might have pushed this coupling into full-blown romance, but Mathias keeps it sweet and fleeting, dropping just enough clues to suggest that even tiny events could prove life-changing for an under-confident young woman standing at a major life crossroads.

A handful of taciturn, sullen characters drifting through a vast panoramic canvas, Runner feels almost like a formalist experiment at times. Mathias and cinematographer Jomo Fray pay knowing homage to painter Andrew Wyeth with their spare visual grammar, creating handsome geometric compositions from wide-open landscapes and clean horizon lines. Indeed, Hannah’s wooden prairie home was partly chosen for its resemblance to the house in Wyeth’s best-known work, Christina’s World. There are also echoes of Terrence Malick in the solemn, lyrical, reverential close-ups of nature here, and of Kelly Reichardt in the empathetic depiction of lightly damaged small-town dreamers. An eerily ambient score by French electronic composer and frequent Celine Sciamma collaborator Para One, aka Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, provides moody counterpoint to the smattering of antique country songs that pepper the soundtrack, deepening the overall aura of timeless jukebox Americana.

Director, screenplay, editing: Marian Mathias
Cast: Hannah Schiller, Darren Houle, Jonathan Eisley, Gene Jones
Cinematography: Jomo Fray
Music: Para One
Producers: Joy Jorgensen, Omar el Kadi
Production companies: Killjoy Films (Germany), Pigasus Pictures (US), Easy Riders Films (France), Man Alive (US)
World sales: Heretic, Greece
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In English
76 minutes

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