Subversive Saturday: The Bunny Game (2010)

Cast: Rodleen Getsic, Norwood Fisher, Gregg Gilmore
Director: Adam Rehmeier
Country: USA
Genre: Horror
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is a continuation of Matthew Blevins’ Subversive Saturday series.

In a bold move taken from the cues of Vienna Actionism and grim concepts only teased in the films of Gaspar Noe and Lars von Trier, Adam Rehmeir creates a film that incites the viewer’s sensibilities and makes them confront the universal darkness that lives within us all as we are all implicated in the perverse torture contained in The Bunny Game, our voyeuristic tendencies revealing uncomfortable truths about our tolerance for maliciousness. It is a film that thrives on negative energy and basks in the shadows of the contrived glory of the ominous Hollywood sign, showing the uncomfortable darkness of reality in a city of false glamour and the black fog of the countless broken dreams of desperate exploited souls. On the desolate outskirts of Hollywood, Rehmeir creates a film that shows the ugliness that lurks in the shadows of every town as the inherent blackness that lies dormant in the human soul takes flight under the influence of drugs and the intoxication of control over another.

…Adam Rehmeir creates a film that incites the viewer’s sensibilities and makes them confront the universal darkness that lives within us all as we are all implicated in the perverse torture contained in The Bunny Game, our voyeuristic tendencies revealing uncomfortable truths about our tolerance for maliciousness.

Rehmeier’s camera is restless as it explores the streets of Hollywood and follows the titular Bunny as she carries on her bleak life of prostitution, the camera always finding beauty amidst the grit and squalor of backalley blowjobs and quick fixes that numb the pain of the uncomfortable realities of the life of a prostitute. He moves around the characters, implicating himself in the actions of the tormentor and his prey as the lines of reality become increasingly blurred in this unflinching experiment in the antagonism of viewer and participants in the film. Rehmeier takes Jim Jarmusch’s tendency of pointing the camera away from a city’s defining characteristics to its furthest degree as he shows the viewers the seedy hotels, alleys, and forgotten graveyards of dead vehicles that are all parts of the city that produces the films that fuel our false unattainable dreams and misconceptions of the world in which we live. Rehmeir breaks the unwritten social contract between filmmaker and audience, showing us something dangerous, real, unblinking, and sometimes permanent.

One could misconstrue the film as misogynistic, but this film allows its women actors to explore their own demons on camera, providing demonic catharsis to its leading lady, Rodleen Getsic, who has experienced the dehumanization of abduction as The Bunny Game’s content was tenuously based on a similar abduction that she had previously endured and survived. This metacontextual element creates a performance that is real and intensely brave as she relives the horrors of her abduction in an unconventional filmmaking technique that feeds on the real to create art that crosses over the line of reality as its actors are shaved and branded, creating something that is uncomfortably permanent in a city that thrives on false pretense and temporary alliances to create fantasies that stay within arbitrarily predetermined boundaries and tamper with emotions that are safe and easily accessible.

One could misconstrue the film as misogynistic, but this film allows its women actors to explore their own demons on camera…

Even within the context of the most horrific gorefest imaginable there are rules that guide the audience safely to the exit at the end, washing away all memory of the tame rollercoaster ride of emotional manipulation as we know that what we have seen is false and contrived to satiate the primal nature that lives within us all. Rehmeier challenges these preconceived notions of a cinematic safety net by showing the audience something unflinching, uncompromising, and permanent. Without the aid of special effects, Rehmeir explores the horror of the mind and the depths of depravity that live within the human spirit. Even if we choose to ignore the ugliness of the world around us, this ugliness still exists and is as every bit real as all that is beautiful and graceful. Film has the power to invite an audience into the world that it fabricates as they share the eye of the camera, teasing out emotion within the comfortable boundaries of “good taste”, typically ignoring the true ugliness that exists in the world or showing it within safe parameters that spare its performers from emotional and physical duress. The Bunny Game steps outside of those boundaries to create moments that are real and require immense commitment from its performers as they dig into their darkest recesses and create art that is confrontational and self-destructive.

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Matthew Blevins

Director of Home Entertainment & Sr. Staff Film Critic

Behind me you see the empty bookshelves that my obsession with film has caused. Film teaches me most of the important concepts of life, such as cynicism, beauty, ugliness, subversion of societal norms, and what it is to be a tortured member of humanity. My passion for the medium is an important part of who I am as I stumble through existence in a desperate and frantic search for objective truths.

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