Stephen de Villiers's 2025 thriller The Run drops a weary courier and a runaway teenager into a near-future Australia where a plague has emptied the rules out of daily life and everyone is moving to stay alive.
What is The Run about?
The film is set in the near future, after a plague has ravaged the land and anarchy has taken over. Nobody stays in one place for long. Mac makes his living doing delivery runs for a manipulator he never sees, taking the job, covering the distance and asking as little as possible. Aliah is on a different kind of run: she seizes her baby and heads for sanctuary, with no guarantee that such a place still exists. The Run follows both of them across a landscape where every road is a risk and every stranger is a question, and where a newborn is the most fragile cargo anyone could carry. It leans on mystery and dread rather than jump scares, tracking how far people will go once the ordinary protections of a society have fallen away, and what it costs to keep trusting anyone at all. Callan Mulvey and Charlotte Maggi anchor a tightly wound cast that keeps the story close and tense rather than sprawling.
About the cast
Callan Mulvey and Charlotte Maggi lead as Mac and Aliah, alongside Felix Cameron, Taylor Wiese, Tim Phillipps, Joe Romeo, Nicholas Hope and Kidaan Zelleke, a cast suited to a story that lives on open roads and in tense, close confrontations rather than big set pieces.
Context & significance
The Run is writer-director Stephen de Villiers's first narrative feature and had its world premiere at the 2025 Adelaide Film Festival. It works in the Australian genre tradition of turning wide, empty country into a source of dread, with a collapsed near-future society in place of anything supernatural, and its mystery is rooted in who is giving the orders and who can be trusted.
Watching The Run on Ktime
The Run streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, part of a catalog built for the Iranian diaspora watching in Farsi wherever they live. All you need is a free K-Time account to log in and start watching — no extra steps, and the page itself stays open to read before you do.