Katarina Zhu in BUNNYLOVR
Becca (Katarina Zhu) spends her nights as a cam girl, a job she seems to enjoy mostly for the control she can exert on her rabid audience of lonely men. This makes sense because she doesn’t seem to have much else in her life under control: she has trouble holding down menial gofer jobs, she constantly lets down her artist friend Bella (Rachel Sennott) who uses Becca as a muse for her paintings, she’s grown distant from her mother, and her long-absent father William (Perry Yung) is worming his way back into her life.
Then the power dynamic starts to shift. She has a customer who is smitten, who spends extra to get Becca away from the group to private chats. He offers to send her a gift and when she accepts, she’s shocked to discover that it’s a rabbit—a real, live rabbit that she now has to take care of. She’s none too pleased with this “gift” that’s really a burden, but he begs her to keep it. He’ll pay her extra. All he asks is that she pose with it…
Zhu wrote, directed, and stars in BUNNYLOVR, her first feature, and she has crafted a fascinating film that walks a fine line between a character study that borders on mumblecore and a tense thriller, two things that don’t seem to go together but somehow work here. Becca is a young woman still fumbling her way into adulthood: she was already reeling from a messy, prolonged breakup with her ex Carter (Jack Kilmer) when her dad shows up out of the blue and drags her to their old Chinatown neighborhood. He makes her help him cheat at cards like old times, even as it becomes obvious to Becca that his health is clearly not great. Gaining a father back just to lose him again is not the kind of emotional burden that Becca is prepared for. Zhu, for her part, does an excellent job of capturing Becca’s anxiety and fragility, bubbling below the surface even when she tries to act confident and in control.
With everything else in her life a mess, Becca is emotionally susceptible to the charms and flattery (and money) of her potential john, impeccably played by Austin Amelio (Fear the Walking Dead) as a man who is equal parts charm and sweaty, gross desperation. As Becca’s connection with him deepens, you may find yourself struggling to silence your inner Whoopi Goldberg (“Becca, you in danger, girl!”) as she starts letting the guardrails designed to keep cam girls like her safe and anonymous fall by the wayside one by one.
Zhu does an excellent job of building up the tension through this escalation, and also by using the rabbit to both tease us with the potential violation of taboos and to kickstart the viewer’s inherent protectiveness toward animals. I don’t feel like most indie cinema fans would feel like any lines are crossed, but be aware that Zhu does dance dangerously close to them at times. It’s also not the kind of movie where the plot moves clearly from A to B, where characters’ motivations for their bad decisions are always clear and everything gets wrapped up in a neat little bow. But the film’s more bizarre elements and the inventive, intriguing ways in which they’re used to explore her character make BUNNYLOVR a captivating watch all the same. | Jason Green
BUNNYLOVR will screen at the Greenfinch Theater & Dive (2525 S. Jefferson Ave.) on Friday, November 7 at 8:30 pm and the Arkadin Cinema & Bar (5228 Gravois Ave.) on Friday, November 14 at 8:30pm as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival 2025. Single film tickets are $15 for general admission, $12 for Cinema St. Louis members and students with valid current photo IDs. Multi-film and all-access passes are also available. Further information is available here. Please note that the festival website has this film listed as a documentary but it is definitely a fictional narrative.
