The Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek once described being in love as a “permanent state of emergency”. This gloomy view seems to underpin Runner, a kinetic, immersive, nerve-jangling chase drama which takes place across a single eventful day in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. As the heroine pinballs around the city on a frantic mercy mission, director Andrius Blazevicius and his audio-visual team blast the viewer with percussive bursts of action, sudden narrative swerves and throbbing electronic music. It marks an impressive tonal shift from the young auteur’s debut feature, the downbeat anticlerical parable The Saint (2016), although there are loose links between the two features.
World premiered at Karlovy Vary film festival last week, Runner initially seems to promise a Baltic twist on Tom Tykwer’s iconic Berlin chase thriller Run Lola Run (1998). But Blazevicius is playing a more ambiguous and subtle game than first impressions suggest, teasing the audience with his unreliable narrator, volatile emotional temperature and hints of a deeper state-of-the-nation subtext. This tricksy cat-and-mouse drama takes a few wrong turns and dead ends along the way, but it should find a receptive festival audience and possible art-house traction.
Intriguingly, Runner seems to revisit the central protagonist from The Saint, Vytas (Marius Repšys), but only makes him a secondary character. Instead, this semi-sequel is driven almost entirely by Marija (punky beauty Žygimant? Elena Jakštait?), a young woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she hurtles through Vilnius desperately seeking her boyfriend Vytas, a gifted academic scholar apparently in the middle of a violent psychotic episode. Judging by her busted lip, and the smashed door of her apartment building, Vytas is a danger to himself and others.
Across 24 frantic hours, Marija criss-crosses the city on foot, by car and bus, gatecrashing old friends and ex-lovers, putting her crappy waitress job on the line with urgent detours to hospitals and police stations. After skillfully dodging Marija all day, Vytas finally surfaces at the university, where he brushes off her diagnosis of his troubled mental state. By this point, Blazevicius has dropped enough clues to suggest that our heroine may be suffering from delusions of her own. After a whirlwind tour of the city’s bars and dance clubs, including a beautifully filmed close-up dance-floor sequence, Marija and Vytas cross paths again in an explosive dawn showdown.
Drawing inspiration from events in his own personal life, Blazevicius has billed Runner as an exploration of love as form of mental breakdown that mirrors the paranoid political climate in post-Soviet Lithuania, all of which is further amplified by the disorienting technological overload of modern life. Marija’s day is a sense-blitzing riot of blaring ringtones, street hassles, traffic jams, social media message pile-ups, pounding techno music, pushy tourists and angry neighbors. At various points her crazed quest to locate Vytas is temporarily knocked off course by that most contemporary of dilemmas, finding a charge point for her dying phone.
There are welcome flashes of dark comedy here, notably when Marija shocks her strait-laced nephew by repeatedly dropping F-bombs, or when she caustically predicts that Vytas will likely be ensconced in a certain downtown bar “drinking and telling everyone that relationships are a capitalist fiction”. But Blazevicius hints at broken lives and long-standing family tensions too. Behind the distracting roar of surface noise, a soft background hum of existential despair prevails. A black dog, that universal symbol of depression which famously haunted Winston Churchill’s bleaker moods, serves as a recurring motif.
Clearly a personal film for Blazevicius, Runner never quite delivers the solid emotional and political punch that it seems to promise. But credit is due to editor Ieva Veiveryte, composer Jakub Rataj and sound design team Martin Ozvold, Lukas Moudry and Krystof Blabla for keeping this wild ride firing on all cylinders. Earning comparisons to a young Jennifer Lawrence from some reviewers, Jakštait? also keeps audience adrenaline flowing with her pulse-racing, compellingly raw performance. This could prove a breakthrough role for her.
Director: Andrius Blazevicius
Screenplay: Andrius Blazevicius, Marija Kavtaradze, Tekle Kavtaradze
Cast: Žygimant? Elena Jakštait?, Marius Repšys, Laima Akstinait?, Vytautas Kaniusonis, Viktorija Kuodyte, Emilija Latenaite
Art director: Aurimas Akšys
Producer: Marija Razgut?
Editing: Ieva Veiveryt?
Cinematography: Narvydas Naujalis
Music: Jakub Rataj
Production companies: M-Films (Lithuania), Bionaut (Czech)
World sales: Alief, London
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (East of the West Competition)
87 minutes
