“Bunny” is that rare indie that bottle-rockets the anarchic pulse of New York without sanding off its grit. It’s riotously funny and unexpectedly tender, a neighborhood caper that doubles as a valentine to the East Village and all of the stubborn, scrappy communities that keep this city feeling like home.
A Love Letter to NYC Without the Sugarcoat
Ben Jacobson’s first feature doesn’t go in pursuit of any postcard glamour. It is, rather, that which welcomes the city’s cramped kitchens, contentious neighbors and acts of generosity at strange hours. Take the midnight momentum of After Hours, add the block-by-block intimacy of Do the Right Thing and piggy in a crime screwball’s nerve. The result is not a curated New York film, but a lived-in one.
A Plot That Sprints but Never Loses Heart
As Bunny, the kindhearted chaos magnet whose birthday implodes before breakfast, Ms. Stark is also one of the co-writers. There’s unexplained blood, a side hustle he describes with disarmingly casual candor and a stutter-step attempt to celebrate that is quickly derailed. A literal Airbnb guest with special religious requirements turns up just when it would be least convenient, a distant father comes and goes under the influence of an especially bad idea, and there’s this body that really makes things complicated. The hook is not so much “whodunit” as “who helps,” and the answer is this building’s take-a-wheel-to-it makeshift family.
What keeps the whole thing afloat, somewhat miraculously, is the film’s refusal to ogle. Even the wildest plot turns get filtered through the pragmatic, affectionate logic of New Yorkers figuring things out together — whether that means arguing over the ergonomics of a rolling suitcase or negotiating with cops who are just a little too amenable for comfort.
A Building Not Your Own Yet, Almost Like Home
Stark’s steely performance anchors the film: a himbo with a heart of gold, prowling like an alley cat who knows every fire escape. (The bobbing, spinning and occasional upside-down-iness are all that tends to take me out of this production: Mostly it’s golden age.) Liza Colby burns as Bobbie, whose ride-or-die loyalty is equaled only by her joy in mischief. (An immune-to-vows sort of guy, sure, but a creatively obscene one.) Jacobson, as best friend Dino — the impulsive protector you call before you even think about calling a lawyer — joins in only up to anti-P.C. fantasy’s point of view. (Linda Rong Mei Chen interjects the building’s matriarch with a no-nonsense tenderness; Genevieve Hudson-Price makes an Orthodox Airbnb guest a scene-stealer without caricature; Tony Drazan supplies a worn-in ache as Bobbie’s dad.) Hovering on the periphery and equal measures of charm and threat are a tag-team pair of two officers played by Liz Caribel Sierra and Ajay Naidu.
The chemistry is wild in the best way. It’s the combustible, tender energy you find on stoops and in hallways — neighbors who’ll argue about noise at 2 a.m. but will still carry your bags upstairs while asking if they can help with supper tomorrow night. That texture matters: the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment has long emphasized that the screen labor sector in the city is run on local crews and performers, providing more than 185,000 jobs and over $80 billion “in economic activity.” It feels as though Bunny was born into that ecosystem, handcrafted for it.
Craft and Comedy on a Nickel and a Shoestring
Indie debuts can skew indulgent when the filmmaker also takes a leading role. Not here. The script by Stark and Jacobson, with Stefan Marolachakis, is sinewy and nervy, scenes clanking close on one another the way subway cars click into place during a quick transfer. The camera work, more so than the camera itself, privileges intimacy — hovering close-ups and compressed frames in which we can see the geography of a compacted apartment and the choreography of bodies clashing within it. The edit keeps the pressure on but leaves pockets for beats in character so punch lines land and small kindnesses register.
There’s craft in the micro-choices: sound cues that tickle alongside tension and farce, production design declaring who these people are from the magnets on their fridge, blocking that laughs itself out of logistics — doors, stairwells and the eternal New York question of who has the key (also known as “who even lives here?”).
Where This Film Fits in the New York City Canon
Bunny is part of an underground cinema of movies that treat New York as a character — mercurial, full and weirdly inexhaustible. Also like In the Heights, it celebrates community without sugarcoating reality; like After Hours, it treats a single day as a pressure cooker. But its hallmark is emotional: the conviction that family forms through proximity and proves itself under duress. That thesis is as New York as bickering over the best slice and eating it anyway.
In a market where the share for comedy on big screens has dwindled and consumers increasingly wait for streaming, that may be the rationale behind laughing becoming communal.
The jokes land harder when a space gasps collectively; the tenderness hits closer to home when a bank of strangers falls simultaneously silent. Bunny is not merely a hilarious East Village yarn. It is a reminder of how cities, and cinema, make strangers allies.
Verdict: A riotous, hot-blooded and inescapably New York must-see.