Sensitive and nuanced, Katarina Zhu’s directorial debut Bunnylovr is a compelling character study that never quite makes sense of the messy life of personal assistant by day / cam girl by night Becca (Zhu). Perhaps that is the point, although the film often edges close to something fascinating only to backpedal––perhaps a feature more than a flaw of Becca, a millennial who finds herself stuck. She’s initially drawn to a mysterious client who first refuses to go on camera with her. The Philly native sends her a rare bunny in the mail to keep her company and then insists on her putting on a show. The connection appears to be driven more by loneliness and isolation than pure fetish, but the film leaves the stranger’s motivations somewhat ambiguous until he lays down the ground rules, at one point telling her this is a transaction.
Living in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Becca has a support network that includes her dying father William (Perry Yung), a gambler who has a strained relationship with his daughter, and best friend Bella (Rachel Sennott), an artist who has received a certain amount of success and pressure to create. Bella and Becca float in the same social circles; Bella is often a model for her work, but they also seem to be drifting apart. Bella is also in the process of navigating a break-up with Carter (Jack Kilmer) in an abrupt sequence that leaves most exposition offscreen.
Bunnylovr‘s strength is in nuance and observation. Cinematographer Daisy Zhou places Becca in tightly framed shots often bathed in the blue light of a computer screen as she drifts through life. The film doesn’t spend a lot of time on exposition, even if later she starts to make sense of her relationship with her father. She holds a day job taking care of the books for a client until he terminates her for several causes, including being late and viewing the cam site on her client’s work computer.
Backed in a proverbial corner, she agrees to meet her online client John (Austin Amelio, who recently made a sinister impression in Hit Man) in Philadelphia, a sequence that doesn’t turn how you may expect. Spending time largely in Becca’s perspective, we don’t get to learn all that much about John beyond a few biographical details: he grew up in Northern Pennsylvania and is navigating a divorce. Before the meeting she tells John that their bunny Milk has died after going into “shock” from his strange request in an earlier conversation. Becca similarly exists in a state of constant protection.
The present-set Bunnylovr, like Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, could be read as a film exploring social isolation in the wake of COVID. Yet the ideas it explores are far from new, touching on the loneliness of a small-apartment life mostly spent online. The film comes up just shy of having a kind of hypnotic, fever-dream quality that it aspires toward. While individual strands amount to something evocative, Zhu’s debut feature is simultaneously frustrating and fascinating; it never quite feels like a cohesive whole. Neither does Becca, putting the film in a quandary: just because she doesn’t take the time to invest in relationships, perhaps guided by depression and loneliness, does the film have to?
Sparse, rough around the edges, and full of possibilities, the mood is infused with the energy of a post-Brat Summer hangover where life moves quickly around Becca as she flounders. Sometimes this approach works, but it comes up just shy of having the emotional resonance of other sparse films about big-city loneliness (e.g. So Yong Kim’s In Between Days). Zhu brings a great deal of sympathy to her performance, yet her directorial debut somehow feels a bit hollow, disconnected by design.
Bunnylovr premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.