2025’s Bunny is the directorial debut of Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the lead roles alongside first-billed actor Mo Stark, who is also credited with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis for writing the film’s screenplay. Stark plays the titular Bunny, a sex worker who provides for his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) by hustling, and who also acts as the de facto leader of his apartment building and its array of kooks. He looks after the elderly Ian, who lost most of the use of one of his arms in a youthful motorcycle accident, and Ian in turn looks after the voluntarily bedbound Franklin, who spends all of his waking hours watching his VHS recordings of the David Carradine series Kung Fu. There’s also Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen), the landlady who’s part of the fun, Bunny’s somewhat dimwitted friend Dino (Jacobson), a trio of partying girls who live downstairs, and a couple of douchey young bros who round out the rest of the cramped, claustrophobic tenement that they all inhabit. On Bunny’s birthday, he runs home in a heightened state and covered in blood, which he attempts to hide from his wife, and into this chaos several other characters enter: their short term rental guest Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), a rabbi (Henry Czerny) Chana summons to ensure that her temporary occupancy is in compliance with her extremely orthodox requirements, Bobbie’s estranged father Loren (Anthony Drazan), and two cops called in by Linda, who struggles through her limited English to explain to them that she fears one of her tenants has died in his apartment. These two cops (Ajay Naidu and Liz Caribel Sierra) end up spending much of the day lurking around Bunny’s front door, which complicates things when the employee of a spurned john appears and tries to murder him, forcing Bunny to kill him in self-defense. 

In our recent discussion of The Beast Pageant, Brandon and I talked about how there are two ways to respond to a cheaply made but nonetheless impressive piece of independent film: “I could make this” (derogatory, denigrating), and “I could make this!” (appreciative, inspired). Jacobson feels like a filmmaker who saw the works of directors like Sean Baker and had the latter reaction. In particular, the choice of making the film’s protagonist a sex worker, setting the film over a single day-long period, handheld guerilla shooting in cramped, real world locations, and focusing on a few intersectional stories with a small cast of mostly unknowns all call Tangerine to mind. The other things that the film feels like it’s borrowing from are both genre products of the nineties: stoner comedies and post-Pulp Fiction dialogue-driven crime capers. For the former, the film is mostly populated with potheads — Dino most obviously, as he smokes incessantly and also gets Bobbie’s father Loren high when he arrives unannounced while Bobbie and Bunny are away. For the latter, the film is a constant wirewalk of trying to figure out how to deal with the body in the hallway and the various lengths that the characters must go to in order to keep the police from finding a pretense to come inside. Where these two ideas intersect is in the constant poor decisions that Bunny and Dino make; when a second dead body is found inside (the tenant Linda was concerned about did, in fact, overdose in his bedroom), the gang quickly comes up with the idea to get rid of that body rather than the man Bunny killed, resulting in a lot of wacky hijinks surrounding getting the corpse into a suitcase and outside. There’s absolutely no reason to get involved with the neighbor’s body, but everyone’s so intoxicant-addled and dim-witted that they just keep making things worse for themselves. 

The film keeps itself from feeling too monotonous despite its single-location setting by threading in a parade of fun characters and letting them bounce off of one another. I was particularly fond of Chana, who defiantly notes that she must be called either “Happy Chana” or by her full name, “never just ‘Chana,’” and whose orthodoxy considerations throw a wrench into the already malfunctioning machine that is Linda’s tenement house. Bobbie leaves the apartment in a huff before Chana arrives, meaning that when their guest arrives to find that she is “alone” with Bunny, she demands that either Bunny leave his own home or that there be at least two other women present since “two women equals one wife.” It’s good stuff, reminiscent of the “Ski Lift” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her presence is a fun complication when having to navigate keeping the cops outside while keeping her from discovering the body (later bodies) that are moved from apartment to apartment. I also appreciated the presence of Loren, whose absurdly self-serving nature is made apparent when he admits that he’s found himself at a loss when his wife finally leaves him—he’s left her before, of course, many times, but now that he’s on the other end of it he feels remorse for ditching his daughter. Loren is on a different journey, like he’s entered this picture from a completely different film in which he’s a deadbeat dad finally trying to make good, but everyone here finds him to be an eye-rolling dick until he actually comes in handy. In a lesser (and more racist) movie, Linda would be used as a comedic punching bag, but here she gets to be a part of the fun, which I enjoyed immensely after some initial skepticism about how respectfully she would be treated. 

With a necessary content warning for this film and its (respectful) treatment of sexual violence, I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to scratch that Sean Baker-ish itch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond