★★★☆☆
A young woman scavenges the ruins of a climate-wrecked Australia, and finds the only thing left to hunt is other people.
The post-apocalypse has become Australian cinema’s home turf, and James Branson’s feature debut, which took the Cult Classic prize at Chattanooga, works that bleak coastline for all it’s worth. Bunny (Kate Wilson) roams a climate-collapsed world she never got to grow up in, raised on scavenged books and the B-movies she once watched in a shack she shared with her father (country musician Andy Golledge, in a dramatic debut). Supplies are gone, food is running out, and there is nothing left to hunt except other people. Branson treats survival as labour, all measured steps and rationed effort, with Bunny carrying a caged rabbit through the dunes as a fragile responsibility rather than a meal.
Kate Wilson is a superb find, making a whole interior life legible through an unreadable face, and the film builds into an increasingly tense, grisly portrait of what solitude does once it becomes the only option. The intrusion of others, chief among them a weary, oddly sympathetic figure played by Ôntrei, tips it toward outright horror and a final act as devastating emotionally as it is brutal, in the register of Bones and All.
If you’re after narrative complexity you may find the material a little thin, as a mood and a character are drawn out across ninety minutes, and the initiating disaster is kept deliberately out of focus. But the baking-sun atmosphere is immaculate, and the closing stretch lands its emotional punch. Bunny Rabbit is one for anyone who likes their survival horror to burn slowly mercilessly in the baking sun.
Bunny Rabbit played at Tubi FrightFest in London.