AAIFF: “Bunnylovr” Tackles Terminally Online Ennui
Following its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Katarina Zhu’s Bunnylovr continues on its festival run at the 48th Asian American International Film Festival. The film marks Zhu’s debut feature as not only writer and director, but also as lead actor. Zhu describes the film as personal, borrowing from her own life story to craft a character who is deeply online. Whose existence rarely stretches beyond that of the computer screen that’s seemingly always glowing in her face. Bunnylovr is a look at the online world, as well as the real one that’s desperate to break through the pixels.
The years after college are brutal in an unexpected way, because it’s usually the first time in a person’s life when their every moment is not scheduled out. Suddenly, the order of daily life is ripped out from underneath and they must figure out how to spend their time. For Rebecca’s (Zhu) time is mostly spent as an online cam girl. She does some assistant work during the day, but what keeps a roof over her head is the cam girl gig. Rebecca has one follower (Austin Amelio) on the site who becomes increasingly demanding of her time and attention. A series of red flags should be going off in her head, but she’s in a rocky patch with her best friend (Rachel Sennott), trying to get back together with her ex-boyfriend (Jack Kilmer), and figuring out what kind of relationship she wants to have with her dying, estranged father (Perry Yung). Those red flags become all Rebecca can cling to as her life falls apart before her eyes.
courtesy of Bunnylovr
A lot of people will watch Rebecca’s series of terrible choices and grow frustrated. In their defense, she does make a lot of decisions that put her life in danger. In Rebecca’s defense, though, she’s in her early twenties, arguably the time when people are most likely to make decisions that actively go against their well-being. To look at Rebecca in Bunnylovr and not feel an ounce of empathy toward her is to forget what it’s like to be young without any sort of guiding light to push you down a smarter, safer path. Movies exist to show us the lives of people we don’t know. You may have never met someone like Rebecca, someone who makes the same choices as her, but you can still offer her kindness. What might make Rebecca such a difficult character to swallow for some viewers is that her depression and apathy are masked by a false sense of empowerment. At one point she says, “I think I might be evil.” Her friend writes it off, but the thought still lingers for Rebecca. In the same way the audience may doubt Rebecca, she’s also not sure if she’s doing the right thing.
There’s a certain type of New Yorkian, mumblecore movie with lead characters you really wish would make better choices in their lives. Anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time coming of age in that city knows this type of movie is basically a requirement for becoming a filmmaker. You have to have an adrift young person who knows there’s something better out there, but cannot figure out how to get out of bed in the morning. That’s not unique to New York, but the city lends itself effortlessly to these stories because of its liveliness. The way the streets feel like they lead to infinite possibilities. It’s why this type of film endures in the way that it has. Zhu grew up in the shadow of the city before attending NYU, and you feel it in Bunnylovr. As cliche as it is, Zhu has made New York a character in the film, just as all the great New York mumblecore flicks have done in the past. Bunnylovr introduces us to a new way of seeing the city.
Bunnylovr won’t be for everyone in the same way that the mumblecore movies woven into its DNA weren’t for everyone. For each person who calls Frances Ha a masterpiece, there’s another who finds it too grating to finish. Bunnylovr delves into the messy parts of the self-conscious early twenties that most people want to forget and asks us to look again. To really look at the world people are coming of age in and see if there’s a place for all their vulnerabilities to exist.
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