Bunny is an unexpectedly delightful little gem of 2025-a gust of darkly comic fresh air that throw us back to those 90s films about wayward youngsters, urban chaos and sharp-edged satire.
Crime and drama collide inside a Downtown Manhattan block populated by an assortment of eccentrics who feel as though they've been marinating there for decades.
Ben Jacobson's feature debut-in which he also plays Dino a perpetually-stoned character-an homage to the 80s and 90s indie cinema that once rendered New York a dreamlike playground where anything could happen, inhabited with uniquely weird residents and charmingly absurd situations.
It evokes works from filmmakers such as Larry Clark, whose gritty, off-the-cuff street films were made on shoestring budgets by directors desperate to capture the wild ecosystem below 14th Street-now, a prohibitively expensive, feels-like exclusive club.
The narrative is as chaotic as it is entertaining, steeped in pitch-black humour and a sense of belonging for anyone who has ever lived in New York or another exciting but exhausting metropolis-this resonates to me as a lost soul/orphan of London life-and who recognises the madness embodied by these characters.
Co-written by Jacobson, co-star Mo Stark (who plays Bunny) and Stefan Marolachakis-presumably under a cloud of cannabis vapour thick enough to classify as weather - the film unfolds over a single, sweltering summer's day.
Everything goes off the rails almost immediately and deteriorates spectacularly as drugs are inhaled, people are murdered and the NYPD arrives solely to debate weirdos and shawarma.
At the centre of the mayhem is Bunny: a look-like Californian hipster surfer teleported onto 2nd Avenue, and who functions as the building's unofficial super.
It's his birthday, and while he spends the day assisting tenants and wandering about with his best mate Dino, he manages to land himself in serious trouble when he strangles a man who confronts him over something tied to his side-hustle as a part-time gigolo.
Chaotic yet assuredly directed, Bunny lurches after these two dedicated weedhounds as they stumble from one calamity to the next, attempting to conceal the corpse while increasingly ludicrous scenarios pile up around them.
Set almost entirely within the building, it exudes a kind of stoned claustrophobia-not a drama about addiction, but a deliriously fun watch filled with tenants who are either the neighbours you never knew you needed or the ones someone else would quite happily have deported.
The camera darts hysterically between still shots and the hand-shaken chaos the story needs to be told, with a fair number of one-take flourishes that complement the natural-light cinematography. It captures the look and feel of a real building-inside and on the sidewalk just outside-with impressive fidelity.
The film isn't burdened with lofty thematic ambitions; instead, it revels in constructing a cavalcade of antics ripe for comic exploitation-if not always for credibility.
But this is precisely the sort of film where authenticity is beside the point. It's a romp, and it gives its cast ample space to play.
It's the perfect film for switching off your brain, tossing your thoughts out the nearest window, and simply enjoying the wild ride-a vision of New York that many of us (I hazardly guess) still dream about.
