Though it’s set in a small, ailing Scottish coastal community, ‘Run’ channels a big, loud American myth. Namely the one so eloquently expressed by Bruce Springsteen in ‘Born to Run’, this low-budget drama’s key inspiration, that fast cars and the open road offer an ideal escape route from humdrum, Nowheresville small-town existence.
Mark Stanley plays Finnie, a thirtysomething father of a teenage son (Anders Haywood), who at the end of yet another long, tedious day gutting fish, decides he’s had enough. He sneaks off with his son Kid’s Honda Civic, accidentally gaining Kid’s pregnant girlfriend (Marli Siu) as a passenger, and desperately relives his reckless boy-racer past.
Pale and sunken-eyed, Stanley renders Finnie as a living ghost, almost: a hollow thing haunting his own life. It’s an arresting performance, complemented by director Scott Graham’s visuals. For much of the film, we see the world from Finnie’s behind-the-wheel perspective, hazed and defocused by a rain-lashed windscreen, with the sound of drunken shrieks and shouts echoing from the streets just off screen. He’s not so much going through hell as through limbo. A predicament worsened by the fact he can see his own recent history repeating itself through Kid.
With a 77-minute running time, a small cast and only a few locations, it’s a compact, stripped-back drama, that has a dogged commitment to its theme that renders it rather one-note, with little to add once its point has been made. But thanks to the seat-clutching intensity of its brief racing scenes and the depth of Stanley’s commitment, it will keep you hooked throughout.