It’s a bleak future that Eren Özkural’s Run Away With Me presents.  Abraham (Kye Loren) is released from prison to a familiar yet dystopian existence.  With no real way to integrate back into society, he finds work from a mysterious and blatantly untrustworthy man (Bill Hutchens), and also meets a peculiarly familiar woman (Rosie MacPherson) along the way who brings his spotted past into a collision with his present, and humanity’s future.

Run Away With Me is a combination of 1980s sci-fi Nintendo games – you know, the ones that didn’t yet have any mainstream design boundaries – and, of course, classic B-movie science fiction from the same era;  it’s Tron meets Blade Runner meets Escape From New York colliding with the box art for Mega Man and Metroid.  It’s as though the film is textured with grime, underneath a layer of surface-level polish, reflecting the seemingly-utopian dystopia in which the Run Away With Me is set.  The unpolished quality of the film’s special effects are a nice throwback to analog days, and they reinforce the unsettling nature the film is projecting: sleek tech concepts with shaky, almost pre-digital performance infest this world’s society.  The buzzy, ethereal drones of the soundtrack benefit from this tightly-conceived design presence.

It’s got a cool story, though it is slow to start and dawdles along the way through an occasionally hammy script.  The final act is where excitement lives for Run Away With Me.  The “science” part of sci-fi is cranked up (with a tad of theology tossed in), and the stakes are beyond enormous.

Run Away With Me is not a thrill-a-minute, but the atmosphere keeps you engaged in Abraham’s journey.  And while it isn’t often for it to receive a shout out in a review, the ending credits are – by loose definition – “radical”.  They are a delicious soup-and-salad combo of everything that inspired Run Away With Me.

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Trevor Jeffery: @TrevorSJeffery