Running Scared

In Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared, sprawling, suburban New Jersey assumes nightmare proportions for two young boys: Nicky and his Russian neighbour Oleg are inducted into a netherworld of mobsters, prostitutes and paedophiles. Just as Kramer’s previous film The Cooler (2003) hinted at an almost magical dimension existing alongside the vicious pragmatism of a Vegas casino, for the stray friends in Running Scared gangland resembles an iniquitous fairytale realm, albeit one beyond even the darkest imaginings of the brothers Grimm.

The ostensible protagonist is Nicky’s dad Joey, a bottom-rung gangster forced to trawl his neighbourhood in search of Oleg, in order to recover an incriminating .38 that the boy has stolen from his basement. Perhaps we are intended to sympathise with Joey. Like the majority of the film’s adult characters, however, he’s so self-serving, volatile and brutish, that our point of identification transposes to the pre-teens. It is from this wide-eyed perspective that we bear witness to unending acts of violence. Foremost is the moment when Joey is held down on an ice rink while a hockey puck is hit repeatedly at his face.

Kramer’s breakneck visual style is similarly bludgeoning. Captured in a frenzy of flashy sound editing and ricocheting camera movements, Running Scared plays as an interminably sustained crescendo. There is no time for the sense of enchantment or mystery that would have legitimised Kramer’s pretensions to fairytale; the film passes in a vertiginous blur of comic-book hyper-reality, leaving an end-title sequence, which recasts the narrative’s main events in Lemony Snicket-esque tableaux, to exhume this subtext.

Running Scared’s most chilling scene occurs when Oleg takes refuge in the back of a van, where he is found and taken home by an outwardly altruistic, middle-class couple. The pastel interiors of their bungalow provide relief after the strip joints and dives encountered thus far, but seem increasingly hellish as full realisation of the pair’s heinous intention dawns. As Oleg locks himself in their bathroom and tries to phone for help, we see frightful flickers of an emaciated Nosferatu-like shadow across the walls. This is a sequence of gut-churning horror. But it is included with disturbing casualness by the film-makers, as just another twist in their nocturnal picaresque, or to establish a hierarchy of immorality that will excuse the nastiness elsewhere.

This review features in the March 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.