Scottish filmmaker Kevin Macdonald has made a career out of studying the human breaking point. From the agonising physical entrapment of Touching the Void (2003) to the real-time hostage terror of the Academy Award-winning One Day in September (1999), Macdonald’s lens consistently permeates the human psyche as characters process claustrophobic, life-or-death pressure.
In his latest psychological thriller, The Runner, he taps into technology’s chokehold on humans. At a time when we have handed control of our lives to the phones in our palms, the film highlights the terrifying extent of this dependency and the ways it can be turned against us.
“This is a modern paranoia. We’re all terrified of the influence of the technology around us,” Macdonald tells The Hindu in an exclusive conversation over Zoom. “On the London Underground featured in the film — or for that matter, even the metros and buses in India — everyone is on their phone. We all know that we’re being controlled, manipulated, and observed. It’s very easy to go from that sense of slight anxiety to imagining a case in which your phone is actually controlling you like a puppet.
A still from ‘The Runner’
| Photo Credit:
Prime Video
The Runner revolves around Maia (Gal Gadot), a high-powered attorney and single mother whose life is upended after a mysterious phone call. To save her abducted son’s life, she must follow cryptic commands and race against time, sprinting across London’s bustling labyrinth of streets and its underground tracks.
For Macdonald, subverting audience expectations was central to the film’s structural tension. Making his return to Hollywood commercial filmmaking, and to major studio-backed narrative with Amazon MGM, after a run of prestige documentary profiles such as Whitney (2018), High & Low – John Galliano (2023), One to One: John & Yoko (2024) and the recent A Beautiful Obsession (2026), a raw and intimate portrait of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, he notes that there was a distinct, unsettling thrill in watching an actor globally recognised as an invincible superhero stripped of her armour.
The project adopts a cinéma-vérité style in its visual narrative, using shaky, handheld camera work to create a sense of events unfolding in real time.
“I loved the simplicity of the story, and it was so different from what I’d done, from very political films, some sort of art-house films, lots of documentaries. Of course, I brought my documentary background to this film. The sense of the city of London, of people on their phones, a lot of the characters we just filmed on a long lens, real people on their devices doing things, and then we would go up and get them to sign, informing them that we had them on camera, and they were pretty thrilled. A lot of the time, Maia’s running through real crowds. We had hidden cameras placed everywhere. So sometimes you’ll see people looking around at her because it’s Gal Gadot running through crowded London streets, and that worked for the story because it’s like, ‘who’s this woman running so fast, looking so stressed?’. But of course the real reason is because they’ve just seen Wonder Woman running by.”
A still from ‘The Runner’
| Photo Credit:
Prime Video
From his masterful adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel The Last King of Scotland in 2006, retelling the story of Idi Amin, the tyrant of Uganda, which marked his directorial debut, to the 2021 legal drama The Mauritanian, based on Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s fight for freedom, Macdonald says being objective as a filmmaker is never easy. Here, pitting his protagonist against a disembodied antagonist, an unknown caller (Damian Lewis), is almost an ironic take on how, despite our connections and independence, humans are more enslaved than ever before.
“Almost every film that I’ve done, in one way or another, is about people caught in impossible situations,” says Macdonald. “In Touching the Void, it’s mountain climbers wondering if they will get out alive. In The Mauritanian, it’s a man inside Guantanamo Bay. In this case, instead of being confined to a prison cell, she is a prisoner within a city of millions. You would think she could find freedom, but she can’t because she’s caught in this electronic net. That’s why I emphasise her seeing people on their phones everywhere — everyone is distracted, and nobody is paying attention to her human crisis. It is rewarding to make a film that serves as real entertainment but also carries a subtle message in a satirical way.”
The Runner is currently streaming on Prime Video
Published – September 02, 2026 12:03 pm IST
