

It doesn’t take long for Run to swerve into being a thriller, one in which Chloe’s forced to question everything she’s taken for granted, including whether she’s really as sick as she’s been told and whether Diane has her best interests at heart. But she’s doting, and if the comfortable two-story home in which the pair live is actually prison, it’s one whose bars Chloe has yet to bump up against.Īnd then Chloe discovers that the prescription bottle for one of her regular medications is not actually in her name, a small disruption that leads to the upending of her entire universe. Diane is the one who drives them into town, doesn’t let Chloe have a cell phone, and keeps the internet-enabled computer in the living room. It’s an isolated life, but the script, which Chaganty wrote with Sev Ohanian, is careful in laying out why Chloe doesn’t see it that way. The film walks us through Chloe’s morning routine of creams, pills, inhalers, blood-sugar-level tests, and leg stretches before showing her spending her days homeschooling and waiting for the mail, anxious for acceptance letters from colleges. She’s Diane Sherman, a single mother whose life revolves around her daughter Chloe (newcomer Kiera Allen), a teen living with a slew of health issues - among them asthma, diabetes, partial paralysis - that are implied to be linked to a premature birth. In Run, the new film from Searching director Aneesh Chaganty, Paulson has again been cast as a caregiver whose displays of self-sacrificing assistance conceal some truly alarming shit. She’s adept enough, actually, to play the part of the malevolent angel of mercy twice in one year. It was another opportunity to show how adept she is with characters who weaponize buttoned-down white womanhood and the expectations of propriety that accompany it - in this case, doling out violence with a smirk and an insistence that it’s for the recipient’s own good. But while giving an origin story to Nurse Ratched, the psych-ward tyrant in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was both unasked for and an odd misunderstanding of the source material, the role, at least, fit Paulson like a latex medical glove. In September, she starred in Ratched, the most recent byproduct of Murphy’s deal with Netflix, and a show with a premise better suited to a comedy sketch about the creatively bankrupt state of the prestige drama than a two-season order. There’s a knowing quality to this approach, a self-awareness that lends itself well to camp, which is one of the reasons Paulson has been such a central presence in the Ryan Murphy Televisual Universe. In a lot of her roles, she wears femininity as though it were a mask that’s always in danger of slipping and exposing more unruly, indelicate realities underneath.

Sarah Paulson has the oval face of a marble Madonna and the fragile affect of someone whose outward show of serenity could at any moment collapse into teary hysteria or explode into rage. Sarah Paulson and Kiera Allen in Aneesh Chaganty’s Run Photo: Eric Zachanowich/Hulu
