Critic Reviews

It's personal without being indulgent, it's unique without feeling incomprehensible, and it's full of heart and soul without being saccharine.

While the understated approach Zhu brings to her debut feature is authentic, it also underplays even big, dramatic developments in Rebecca’s life. The result is a tiny thing you can hold in the palm of your hand, soft and delicate and mild.

As is, “Bunnylovr” feels like a stone skipped across the surface of a pond; we could go deeper, but instead we choose to skim the surface. It’s a glossy, moody surface, mind, but surface nonetheless.

Bunnylovr‘s strengths are in its engaging character study of a languid young woman who came of age online. It’s not a novel portrait, but Zhu makes it wholly her own.

Despite some of Bunnylovr's shortcomings, Zhu has a knack for filmmaking, and it's an exciting debut for the young artist.

Bunnylovr, the first feature from Katarina Zhu, touches on various themes, none of which feels fully realized. Yet there is such a sweet symbiosis between Zhu’s intimate, easy directing style and her unselfconscious performance in the lead role — beautifully illuminated by Daisy Zhou’s gentle cinematography — that the movie’s aimlessness rarely grates.

Bunnylovr is another attempt to examine the melancholy that is especially prevalent among the young. What it gleams is an intriguing portrait, but it is also inconsistently engaging.

Zhu brings a great deal of sympathy to her performance, yet her directorial debut somehow feels a bit hollow, disconnected by design.

Following Zhu’s peculiar white rabbit is never less than an intriguing experience, but in the end, it feels like a hollow one.

Uneven pacing and an anemic plot hamstring the film, which has a couple of interesting ideas yet precious few about how to convey them to its audience.