Suspending Disbelief

Suspending Disbelief

We watched The Runner last night — one of those thriller movies where the hero faces an impossible task or else someone dies. In this case, the protagonist’s child. The antagonist has every advantage: he has her kid, he knows her every move, and he forces her into an unthinkable mission — kill her own client, a key witness under tight security. She has one hour to run five miles to the hotel where he’s being held. The stakes are brutal, the odds impossible, and yet we buy in. Why? Because we’ve entered the realm of suspended disbelief.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term in 1817—that silent agreement we make to leave real‑world logic behind and step into a world built from improbable coincidence and sheer determination. Whether it’s a movie or a novel, the writer has to uphold their end of the bargain by building that world with consistent internal logic.

That trust is fragile. Break it, and the whole thing collapses. Like when a heroine survives a ten‑minute chase, jumps off a bridge with nothing but a cell phone, and appears in the next scene unbruised, chipper, and dressed in a perfectly tailored outfit. My wife just says, “What?” — and the movie falls apart.

Invest an hour in a film or a week in a book, and if the ending violates the story’s own rules, it feels like betrayal—the kind a writer may never win back.

For me, The Runner held up. Gal Gadot made the ordeal feel real: battered, bruised, terrified, determined. A hero worth rooting for, with stakes unimaginably high and a mission no one could survive.

Suspending disbelief is a high‑stakes risk for both reader and viewer. The responsibility on the writer’s side is enormous. Betrayal, often unforgivable.