‘Bunnylovr’ Review: Not Even the Songs of Charli XCX Can Save This Aimless Rabbit’s Tale [C] – Sundance Film Festival

Reuben Baron January 31, 2025

When her most insistent client John (Austin Amelio, AMC’s The Walking Dead) asks what sort of things she likes to do, Bunnylovr’s cam girl protagonist Rebecca (played by writer/director Katarina Zhu) answers, “I don’t do anything.” That’s not too much of an exaggeration. She works a “boring normal job” on top of camming, and she occasionally models for her artist friend Bella (Rachel Sennott, in her Bottoms, Bodies Bodies Bodies comic relief mode). She’s still hurting from a break-up with her ex-boyfriend Carter (Jack Kilmer), and has reconnected by chance with her estranged and dying father William (Perry Yung). But she doesn’t have any bigger goals in her life, and even if she had them, she shows little ability to stand up for herself.

Rebecca’s life is mostly pretty boring, and large chunks of the movie Bunnylovr are boring and scattershot as a result. It meanders from scene to scene with little momentum, and never provides much deeper insight on the subjects it touches upon. Rebecca’s growing distance from Bella means their friendship is never a source of much interest, though Sennott’s sense of humor is very welcome in the few scenes she appears in (Sennott is Zhu’s IRL friend from NYU, and convinced Charli XCX to license her music for the soundtrack). The father-daughter subplot feels like it’s missing several scenes that should be there; it lacks the emotional impact you’d think such a subplot would be going for. The most interesting part of the film, and also its most frustrating, is the parasocial relationship between Rebecca and John. If Bunnylovr were a bit more focused on that, it could work as a flat-out horror movie – albeit one of the sort where the audience is constantly yelling at the main character for making the worst possible decisions.

For the first half hour or so of the movie, John refuses to show his face to Rebecca in their private chats. He sends her a strange gift: a pet bunny. Rebecca doesn’t see herself as responsible enough to care for animals, but John insists she keep it… and insists she start doing things with the bunny on camera for his own pleasure. And she goes along with it. Animal lovers can be assured that the bunny does not die (and the Humane Society was present throughout the shoot; no animals harmed in the making of this film). However, it will require a vet visit. John’s bunny-related fetishes become yikes enough to the point where Rebecca loses a lot of audience sympathy for going along with his instructions.

It’s hard to understand why Rebecca goes along with all this, and even harder to understand why she goes from passively following to actively trying to pursue an in-person relationship with John. When John can’t make it to New York for a date, Rebecca offers to travel to Pennsylvania to visit him. Predictably, this is a very bad idea. To compare with another recent movie about a sex worker navigating the lines between personal and transactional relationships, some critics of Anora have argued that Ani should have known better than to take Vanya’s proposal seriously, but Anora succeeded in giving us a sense of how and why Ani could trick herself into believing in him. Put politely, Austin Amelio does not look like Mark Edelshteyn, and where Vanya had a certain boyish charm, everything about John just screams gross pervert.

But what if Rebecca is interested in John because she’s also a gross pervert? After one of the most yikes scenes in the movie, Rebecca tells Bella, “I think I’m evil.” She won’t tell her friend what prompted these thoughts, but she does reflect on her fear that any power she has will be abused (Bella doesn’t understand what “power” she could have – “It’s not like you’re the President.”). Is her chronic passivity a defense against her own sense of “evil”? A curious late reveal about William leads to even more self-reflection on Rebecca’s potentially questionable inclinations.

Zhu has said that Bunnylovr initially had an even darker tone but that she toned it down to make the film more accessible. A darker version would certainly be harder to watch, but it might have also been more honest and insightful. The final cut of Bunnylovr is stuck in an awkward middle space – it’s too upsetting, with too frustrating a protagonist, to entertain as a casual hangout movie, but it never reaches the point of becoming something truly transgressive and thrilling. There was potential for something better with this material, but the end result is yet another Sundance disappointment.

Rating: C

This review is from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where Bunnylovr had its world premiere. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution.