“To Run Is To Return”: Even Caretakers Need Care

Precious Wura Alabi’s To Run Is To Return is about a quiet kind of collapse: one that happens behind a smile, professional demeanour and the practiced assurance that everything is under control. The 2026 Black Star Film Festival selection follows Michael, a young Black British pharmacist who navigates an exhausting 11-hour shift while his personal life steadily unravels. Because the film is less interested in the spectacle of a breakdown than in what comes before it, it lingers on the exhausting performance of being fine.

Michael begins his day willing himself into optimism. Soon, problems arrive one after another. A patient wants Viagra. Another comes in with a rash and an alarming willingness to share it. Someone else is convinced she has lost all sensation. The encounters are occasionally funny, sometimes absurd, but their humour serves a larger purpose. Because Michael is surrounded by people who need something from him, and he is exceptionally good at giving it to them. That competence becomes the film’s central tension. Michael knows how to respond when someone else is in distress. He can answer questions, dispense medication, absorb awkwardness, and move a conversation along. What he cannot seem to do is turn that same attentiveness inward.

The contrast becomes increasingly painful as the shift continues. Between patients, Michael tries to make personal calls and use whatever coping mechanisms might get him through the day. His marriage is deteriorating. He is estranged from his family. He is carrying depression and grief that he has repeatedly postponed dealing with. The film makes that pressure visible by placing each problem beside the next person at the counter. This is where To Run Is To Return finds its most compelling idea: sometimes functioning can become a form of avoidance.

Michael does not appear incapable. Quite the opposite. He is capable enough to keep going. He can work an 11-hour shift while his personal life is in disarray. He can remain useful while emotionally exhausted. He can perform normality convincingly enough that the people around him might never know how close he is to coming apart. The film understands that this kind of distress rarely announces itself dramatically. Michael’s profession makes that contradiction particularly striking. Healthcare workers are expected to be calm in the face of other people’s fear, pain, and vulnerability. Their own emotions are often treated as something to manage privately, and Michael embodies the impossibility of that division. He is spending his day absorbing fragments of other people’s lives while carrying an increasingly unbearable amount of his own.

His colleague Serina, the dispenser, seems to recognise this before Michael is willing to acknowledge it himself. Their relationship offers one of the film’s quieter reminders that people can notice our suffering even when we have become skilled at concealing it. Michael is not entirely invisible. He is simply unwilling, or perhaps unable, to stop performing.

There is also something significant about making Michael a Black British man. The film does not reduce his emotional repression to a simple statement about Black masculinity, but his stoicism inevitably sits within a wider cultural expectation that Black men should be resilient, composed, and capable of enduring difficulty without complaint. Michael’s struggle suggests the danger of resilience when it becomes indistinguishable from suppression. The very qualities that make him dependable can also prevent him from admitting that he needs help.

The film’s title captures this contradiction. To Run Is To Return suggests that escape and confrontation can ultimately lead to the same place. Michael spends the day moving constantly, but emotionally he is stuck. He runs into work, into responsibility, into professionalism, into the needs of strangers, and so the memories and grief he has avoided remain waiting for him.

By the film’s final stretch, that avoidance becomes impossible to ignore. In a message to his mother, Michael admits that he has been delaying reality, perhaps even learning the habit from her. He recalls spending the day at work thinking about moments he has already missed and people he cannot get back. The confession is hesitant and fragmented, and the film uses that to show how speaking plainly about his emotional state has become difficult for him. Eventually, he arrives at the simplest truth: he is not doing well.

It is an understated conclusion, but that is precisely what gives it weight. To Run Is To Return does not demand a grand transformation from Michael. It does not suggest that acknowledging his pain will immediately repair his marriage, resolve his grief or cure his depression. Instead, it recognises the first and perhaps most difficult act of honesty: admitting that the performance has become unsustainable.

Alabi’s film is ultimately a portrait of a culture that often celebrates resilience without asking what it costs. To Run Is To Return makes a quiet argument: you can be competent and still be struggling. You can be dependable and still need someone to take care of you. You can spend an entire day helping other people and still not know how to help yourself.

Sometimes, being fine is simply another thing we learn how to perform. And when the performance becomes unsustainable, we have to stop running.