The Run (2025)
Stephen de Villiers has made a film that demonstrates real craft and genuine ambition, which makes it all the more frustrating that it doesn’t deliver on either. His debut feature arrives with visual authority and a serious premise, and squanders both through a persistent reluctance to go where it appears to be heading.
Set in 2036, the story drops us into an Australia that has seen better centuries. A mysterious plague has triggered renewed lockdowns, civil unrest, and — the detail that gives the film its sharpest edge — a complete cessation of human births. Three years, four months, and eight days since a baby was last registered in the country. Into this arithmetic of despair comes Mac (Callan Mulvey), an ageing smuggler compelled to perform deliveries for a criminal syndicate in exchange for the care of his ailing wife. When his latest assignment brings him into contact with Aliah (Charlotte Maggi), a young runaway mother carrying a newborn — the first in years — Mac faces a choice between completing the job and protecting what the job requires him to destroy. Together, they attempt to stay ahead of a relentless and violent pursuit across the South Australian landscape, with the baby serving as the film’s moral centre of gravity.
Cinematographer Michael Tessari draws out the full severity of the Adelaide Hills and Fleurieu Peninsula, rendering the terrain with scale and a cold, unsentimental intent. The land absorbs the story’s dread: wind farms and the occasional drone sit at the edge of frame as unobtrusive markers of a society that has contracted around its own fears, masks still worn, shops open with the provisional air of places that have stopped assuming permanence. The world of The Run feels inhabited, which is rarer in low-budget dystopian filmmaking than one might hope.
Callan Mulvey brings a weathered gravity to Mac, and the performance is physically convincing in a role that asks him to carry the film’s moral weight almost entirely in his posture. Charlotte Maggi holds her own in a role that demands sustained physical and emotional range, though the script periodically forgets to give her much to react to beyond threat and motion. Nicholas Hope, as the service station operator Jimmy, delivers the film’s most alive performance: dishevelled and deeply unpredictable, he carries a grimy menace that the main narrative sorely needs more of. In my opinion, Hope’s Jimmy is the kind of supporting turn that makes you resent how little screen time he occupies.
De Villiers is evidently working within a tradition he takes seriously. The fertility crisis premise carries unmistakable echoes of Children of Men; the scoured landscape and terse masculinity nod to The Road and, closer to home, various iterations of Mad Max. The pressure placed on women’s bodies in times of civic collapse — who controls reproduction, what institutions do when fear outpaces reason — runs as a thematic current through the film, raised with some care and then abandoned before it does any real work. The film would have been stronger, in my view, for having the courage of its implications.
Where the film comes apart is character development. Mac and Aliah are drawn in outline where they needed depth. We receive glimpses of Mac’s past, but not enough to understand the interior life that might make his eventual choices feel earned. The film is similarly reticent about its wider world: the scope of the fertility crisis, the nature of the institutions that have failed, the political forces operating in the wreckage — all of it receives less attention than the story’s momentum requires. A lean film can be economical with information, but The Run is economical in ways that leave its most pressing questions unanswered.
What de Villiers has made is a debut feature of genuine visual intelligence and serious intent, with enough sustained tension to carry viewers to the end. It does not, in my view, fulfil the promise of its premise. A film this absorbed in what societies do when reproduction fails and authority collapses should leave its audience with something to argue about on the way home. The Run raises those arguments and declines to follow them.