Sundance 2025: Bunnylovr, Atropia, Love, Brooklyn | Festivals & Awards

The worst feeling is when you have high hopes for a few films, only to see them be varyingly disappointing. The three films here remind you how important a good script is, one that develops itself beyond being simply an interesting concept into a form that invites interpretation. It’s all worth noting that sometimes a great performance, indelible photography and strong directorial choices can elevate a script. But even they can only go so far. These are films I admire far more for their attempt than their follow through.

In writer/director Katarina Zhu’s laborious debut feature “Bunnylovr,” Rebecca (Zhu) makes her New York City rent working as a camgirl. During the film’s opening scene, for instance, she shares pictures of her feet. Among her many clients, however, is one who literally wants her all to herself. It’s a guy who initially doesn’t want to show his face but consistently pays for private chats. As a gift, he eventually sends her a white bunny, which will serve as a not-so subtle metaphor about the emotional toll Rebecca sustains to appease everyone from her selfish ex-boyfriend, her self-absorbed artist friend (Rachel Sennott), and her troubled father. It’s the latter’s abandonment and Rebecca’s desire to build a relationship with him that, once again, points to the not-so subtle culprit of Rebecca’s low self-worth. It’s all, as you can tell, a bit on the nose. 

Zhu’s compassionate but meandering film, the latter being somewhat intended, is mostly guided by Rebecca’s ennui. We’re never quite sure if she has any dreams, and she mostly drifts from one toxic space to another. Even when her noxious exclusive client begins to show obvious signs of cruelty, she continues seeing him; not solely because she begins to lean on him financially, but also due to her inability to differentiate between attention and love. As such, Zhu hangs the possibility of Rebecca facing sexual and physical violence over the audience for a nauseating sense of dread. 

Though Zhu certainly knows how to create atmosphere—whether it’s Rebecca lounging by the glow of the screen or it’s the mix of cold diffused and warm ambient lighting that reflects Wong Kar-wai and Edward Yang—she leaves the realist details to the side. This might be a quibble, but for a person taking care of a bunny, a very high maintenance animal, there aren’t many scenes of her actually caring for it beyond better it. And while the aimlessness of the film is, once again, intended, you can’t help but shake the feeling that we’re as far away from Rebecca as the people on the other side of the screen. 

How exactly do I explain what “Atropia” is? The easy summary is that Hailey Gates’ directorial debut is a scattershot, romantic satire that plays like a meeting of “Hollywood Shuffle” and “Ishtar” until it mind-numbingly flounders. The Luca Guadagnino-backed production follows Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), an Iraqi-American actress who performs as an insurgent at a fake Middle East town called “Atropia,” based in southern California. The town is populated by a plethora of other actors, some are Iraqis, while others are jokingly Mexican. They train soldiers by participating in training exercises prior to these servicemen’s deployment.

The film takes place in the shadow of 9/11. And while Fayruz has complex feelings about being a cog in this war machine, she takes her job seriously. She coaches the other actors on how to tap into their emotions and researches her parts. She dreams of stardom, and hopes to use these roles, which she doesn’t appear to find degrading, as means for attaining a career. Her daily routine is complicated by the arrival of Abu Dice (Callum Turner), a current soldier stationed at the training center in between rotations. The pair begin to fall for each other, and for a time, “Atropia” is a dark, kinky sex comedy. “I’ll wash you like a dirty dish,” is delivered as a saucy provocation by Turner to Shawkat. Gates lampoons the military’s incompetence, such as the town’s supervisors who act more like casting directors than trustworthy government officials. A needle drop of Phantom Planet’s “California,” desert turtles, and a side-splitting cameo are the silly punchlines in this sweaty film. 

For the first half of “Atropia,” the jokes and zingers are enough to keep the threadbare narrative afloat. You get the sense that Gates wants this satire to make a larger statement about America’s war on terror, but she often stops short. While we learn that Fayruz’s family hates the work she does, we’re not privy to whether Fayruz holds a complicated or simple outlook on her job. We’re teaching these soldiers to “invade our homeland in a gentler way,” says one character to Fayruz. You can’t help but feel that Gates has geared a film toward Americans exercising their own guilt rather than a picture capable of thinking about the people most affected by the war. The fun, kinetic energy that makes the early going of “Atropia” so enjoyable devolves into a nightmare in the second half.     

Sometimes you see a pair of performers so perfectly cast, you already know the film is going to have a firm baseline. In Rachael Abigail Holder’s slight directorial debut, “Love, Brooklyn,” André Holland is Roger, a flirtatious journalist presently dating single mother Nicole (DeWanda Wise). Nicole Beharie is Casey, Roger’s former flame and gallerist. All three characters are holding onto the past to the point of stasis. Casey doesn’t want to sell to the gentrifying construction company looking to buy a gallery her grandmother founded. Nicole, whose husband tragically died, is still holding onto his memory while considering the comfort of her daughter Ally (Cadence Reese). Roger not only can’t let go of Casey, he also has a reported piece about the rejuvenation of Brooklyn post-COVID he refuses to finish.  

“Love, Brooklyn” is a modest, unassuming relationship drama whose momentary tension is resolved far too neatly to scratch the ruminative tone it hopes to set. There are moments that spell a deeper design, like when Roger meets his editor to discuss his unwritten piece. “The free movement of Black expressionism is over,” she quips when he considers writing a piece about the dwindling square footage of Blackness in the borough. At another point, Roger and Casey view painter Henry Ossawa Tanner’s evocative work “Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” and discuss the themes of the Biblical story and its moral of leaving what you can’t take with you. The camera also savors Brooklyn during Roger’s many bike rides, spelling a love of Blackness existing freely within the city. Paul Zimmerman’s flat script, however, doesn’t manage to thread these themes in a satisfying manner. You just get the sense these pretty images are just crumbs that came from wet bread. 

Rather the film needs its performances to harden its intended impact, and they nearly do. Holland and Beharie are as lovely as you’d expect; they’re physically attuned to each other’s presence and have a strong relationship to each other and the camera. When they’re together, it feels like we’re a fly on the wall watching something private, something sacred. Wise as Nicole is equally incredible, handling the film’s best scene—a powerful sequence that forces Roger to contend with his selfishness—that left me as speechless as Roger. The actors add when the rest of the film appears to be subtracting from itself.