The Runner

A couple living in a small, quiet, out of the way town, have their peace broken by the arrival of a police detective, who is looking for a fugitive that might have come their way.

Samuel (Cyrus) and June (Bailey) are enjoying a restful day on the sofa, quietly reading their books and resting in the silence that surrounds them. It’s snowing outside and there’s a blanket of white lying across the landscape and hanging off the trees, softening the sound further and enhancing the feeling of solitude that their quiet cabin seems to offer. Rolling up to their house, however, is Detective Martin (Medeiros), an out-of-town policeman who is looking for information and wanting to ask questions of the couple.

After rapping on the door, Detective Martin is needlessly enigmatic in his introduction, evading basic questions and finding it hard to reveal why he’s at the couple’s home. With a bit of badgering and sustained inquiry, he finally lets out that he’s looking for a fugitive who might be in the area, and we can at last get into the scenario of The Runner properly.

Detective Martin is invited inside and eventually gets around to telling the story of The Runner, a woman who embezzled millions of dollars from her clients in California and then killed her husband when he found out about it. Samuel and June listen to the story intently, not recognising the events or story that the detective is telling, until finally he gets around to revealing that this all happened over two years ago. Now there’s new evidence and a new lead to suggest that The Runner might be in the area and so Detective Martin has turned up to see what he can turn up in the small town of Pinewood.

At just over seven minutes long, The Runner doesn’t have a lot of time to explain its plot and work through its narrative. It’s a shame then, that time is wasted with bad dialogue and phony characterisation that offers nothing to the story or those telling it. Detective Martin takes an age to get around to the point of his visit and then doesn’t reveal the timeframe of the crime until past the midpoint of the film, stretching an already extremely thin scenario to near breaking point despite the fact that the film is so short.

The cinematography, too, is underwhelming and unconsidered, as the snowy background beyond the porch of the house is a blanket whitewash with zero contrast and heightened reflective glare. The focus on Detective Martin is also out as he sits on the chair opposite the couple, who are each in perfect HD focus, and this fuzziness follows him out to the car after he has completed his interview. While writer/director/producer/star, Andrew Medeiros manages to select his shots, fill his frames, and build his narrative fairly well with his direction, he is let down by a nonsense script that brings up more questions than it answers.

When the killer is finally revealed, and although I won’t give it away, gee whizz it doesn’t take much to figure out just who The Runner turns out to be, we really have to ask ourselves the question as to why Detective Martin didn’t click right away. Samuel manages to figure it out within the space of a minute, so you would imagine that someone who has been on the case for two years, and has had days to look over the CCTV screenshot of the presumed killer, would be able to make the link, or to know that he might be in danger.

There is no tension, no surprise, and no thrill, in this supposed thriller, with the only saving grace being that it is so short that we don’t have to sit through extended scenes of the nothing that is presented to us. The turgid monologue at the end, voiced over a black screen to begin with, is indicative of the horrible scripting throughout the piece, as The Runner tries to philosophise, or soliloquise, or romanticise, or who knows what it is she’s trying to do, as she delivers some sort of killer’s lament to us about her way of life. There is not a lot to recommend The Runner to the audience, and in the end the only running that should really be going on is in the other direction, away from watching another bad short film.