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It takes a fair amount of skill and creativity to make a movie, if not some sheer force of will. No where more recently have I seen that exemplary that in super low-budget indie film Don’t Run. I went into this film without much expectation, the trailer seemed like it may have some technical issues, but I kept an open mind.
Peter is a weird kid. A moody, socially awkward teen with his head in the stars and a mild dependency on prescription meds. His mother waffles between treating him with kid gloves and somewhat fearing his emotional outbursts. In their new town, Peter immediately attracts the attention of the local bullies and skips out on his first day of school. From here, the tragedies accrue, and Peter is left in his home, alone, warned by a bandaged stranger to be in bed by sundown or his “associate” will devour him. Peter must struggle with social services, bullies, his dog, detectives, and an infatuated neighbor to maintain normalcy in the daylight hours and keep them out of the house at night.
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On first impressions, I was underwhelmed. The story is somewhat scattered, focusing on odd details and relationships that seem inorganic. Frights are relatively convenient and occasionally contrived. The cinematography is overexposed, color palettes dreary, and the acting vacillates between passable, heavy-handed, and downright not there. For the 76-minute runtime, I was confounded by the sheer amount of exposition over action. Watching Don’t Run has the very real feeling that you’re piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces are from different boxes. Things don’t quite fit.
And yet, there’s something ultimately endearing about the film. We get mini-action movie scenes, what Peter watches while stuck at home, that were specifically made by writer/director Ben Rood for these moments. We get a driveway dance break that cools our inner critic. We get a pair of overzealous detectives who seem relatively out of place but are played with such over-the-top enthusiasm, like actors in a Troma film, it’s enjoyable. Don’t Run’s latent enthusiasm and commitment made me want to know more about how exactly this film came to be. With just a bit of research, I found out exactly how truly inspiring it is that this movie exists at all.
Writer-director Ben Rood was a tree-installer to the stars in L.A. while trying to make it as a screenwriter. He claims to have ruined Courtney Cox’s hardwood floors in his entertaining bio on Don’t Run’s promotional website. After hurting his back and never quite making it on the L.A. scene, he moved back to Ohio to live with his parents and, after three months of grueling physical therapy, decided he was going to make a movie. He cobbled together the shoe-string budget working 70-hour weeks hauling furniture. He also became a firefighter. His passion for finishing the project never waned, and with a Lynchian kind of commitment, he wrapped in 2018 and earned Don’t Run a slot on Amazon Prime (included with membership).
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The film is a meditation on what it is to run from your struggles, hide from your fears, and not face the world head on. Those things that may be holding you back, a new environment, social anxiety, those meds your doc says you don’t need anymore, they become excuses to not live your life to the fullest. It’s a resonant message that’s comes off as very personal to the filmmaker, a man who had dreams of “making it big in Hollywood,” only to leave La La Land with a shattered back and bruised ego. His experience contributes to much of what the film does right. The clarity of vision and transcendent moral are purposeful to the ticking clock structure. And, there’s some pretty solid creature FX to boot.
For a filmmaker working on the fly, Don’t Run is a quiet little piece of middle-market cheese that stands as a testament to what you can do if you set your mind to a goal and put in the work. And work he did, as Ben Rood was nearly single-handed in writing, directing, editing, and financing what is sure to become an obscure cult favorite of our time.
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