FrightFest review – Bunny Rabbit

FrightFest review – Bunny Rabbit

This opens (topically) with wildfire footage, hinting that the near-future (2030) apocalypse which ends civilisation and turns Australia into the kind of post-apocalypse wasteland seen not only in Mad Max 2 but a bunch of VHS cassettes of things like 2020 Texas Gladiators, Hardware and The Bronx Executioner which pile up in the shack willed to the heroine (Kate Wilson) by her late father (Andy Golledge).  Food is scarce but there’s still electricity to run a video player and put up spotlights around the homestead, an odd choice which is actually a slightly disturbing tipoff of the way things are going.

Unnamed in the film but called ‘Bunny’ in the end credits, the young woman can’t remember a time before the collapse – she calmly puts a wounded man out of his misery early on, and doesn’t give off victim vibes even when encountering characters who would usually be antagonists in a Mad Max movie … the cult leader (Paul Hughes) down the road with a harem of slaves … a hitchhiker (Saxon Cook) who seems so talkative and friendly we intuit there must be a hidden agenda … and a home invader (Ôntrei) who has just enough memory of civilisation to be unable to commit to the sort of free-range ruthlessness he’d need to be a proper apocalypsploitation villain (when he ties Bunny up, it’s not to torture or sexually abuse – but to have someone to listen to his monologue).  Calling a lone girl in the wilderness ‘bunny’ seems to frame her as a likely victim of predators, but this is Australia where rabbits have a different reputation – that silly film Night of the Lepus is based on an Australian novel (Russell Braddon’s The Year of the Angry Rabbit) and opens with startling real-life footage of rampaging rabbits.

In a voice-over, Bunny’s father says he’d die before he resorts to cannibalism – but there’s mystery meat in Bunny’s fridge (and jamjars of blood) and it slowly emerges that this post-civilisation girl has many of the attributes of a very familiar monster in a whole new setting.  Director-writer James Branson ventures into almost generic territory – possibly at the head of a wave of climate change apocalypse pictures – but with a very distinct approach, at once starkly visual and surprisingly verbose.  The near-silent Bunny is surrounded by men who won’t shut up while their throats are intact, and the freeform chatter is often witty, poetic or affecting.