Katarina Zhu directs herself in the languid webcam drama ‘Bunnylovr’

It might seem paradoxical, but even the occasional three-hour slowburn (like the character drama Drive My Car, just to name one off the dome) requires internal momentum to maintain its languid appearance. Zhu, on the other hand, only gestures at emotional intrigue via unbroken closeups of her character Rebecca, a curious 20-something New Yorker who moonlights as a cam girl in online chat rooms. After a breakup, she becomes cautiously fixated on a high-paying webcam client, John, or “jas95” (a typically skeevy Austin Amelio), who gifts her with an adorable pet rabbit before making some strange requests. At around the same time, Rebecca also runs into her estranged, ailing father William (Perry Yung), who she re-connects with after 15 years.

Unfortunately, the way each bit of drama is assembled—which is to say, the way Bunnylovr moves between its parallel plots—is woefully mechanical, despite bearing the tactile texture of something excitingly modern. Phone and computer screens abound, but at no point do they feel like windows to the soul. Rather, they’re merely doorways to extraneous exposition, disguised as breathy confessions alternating with extended silence. This mode of storytelling seldom evolves beyond Rebecca and John’s initial trepidations; after a while, you can set your watch to each cut on a hesitant beat.

Can the duo’s long-distance dynamic evolve from transactional into something genuine? Do John’s potentially nefarious motives for sending Rebecca a bunny interfere with this transformation? And can Rebecca, um…hang out with her father sometimes, and get over the nondescript reasons they haven’t spoken for a while, as she travels to her equally nebulous day job performing some kind of financial data entry? All these questions and more are broached in the same exact, neatly segmented manner: via unobtrusive scene transitions that give way to sparse dialogue beset by lengthy, empty pauses, yielding a kind of cinematic laminar flow, where no matter what actually transpires, things appear entirely stagnant.

For a tale set in New York’s lower east side, and around the bustle of Chinatown, it’s dispiritingly flat in its audiovisual musings. We only see hints and slivers of what the world is like outside Rebecca’s door, regardless of how much time she spends around other people. Even her friend Bella, a pretentious painter played by Rachel Sennott, feels more like a broad, sketch-comedy send up of a trust fund gentrifier than a real human being with dimensions, so her presence illuminates little about Rebecca’s life or personality. “I think I’m a bad person,” Rebecca tells her, after crossing an ethical line on her webcam; here, the movie promises to open up riveting new dimensions before immediately shutting them down. Given its dramatic parameters—its abruptness of character and rhythm—it’s left with nowhere to go.

Remove any one supporting player and you don’t end up losing all that much, which is an odd thing to realize about a film that only has two or three. Rebecca’s relationship with her father does evolve, but much of this seems to happen off screen. Time after time, Zhu’s character makes key decisions or alters her outlook in ways that feel practically random, making her unpredictable, but not in an exciting way. William, for instance, has a gambling habit, and when she watches him hustle at a local park, it’s hard to gauge why her responses to him evolve from scene to scene (let alone how his declining health will affect her from one moment to the next). While you could isolate a shot or two and find chaotic intimacy akin to a Safdie Brothers New York saga, this doesn’t really extend to the movie’s overall fabric. Its puzzle pieces only fit together because their corners have been sanded down; they lose their shape and sit side by side, never interlocking. It’s a grid—technically the only New York thing about it—but it ought to be a fabric.

As an actress, Zhu creates dimensions that her script and filmmaking just don’t seem to contain. She plays Rebecca with a mischievous depth and self-effacing vulnerability that just aren’t meaningfully explored. Her performance is physically fluid, and peppered with hesitation. Rebecca enjoys what she does while maintaining a cautious distance, but these aspects of her personality are seldom explored by the lens. As a filmmaker, Zhu must have at least some idea of who this character is, and why her existential doubts matter enough to place them in front of a movie camera where she herself is the subject. Unfortunately, she isn’t able to adequately express these tenets through her aesthetic approach. She ends up stranding herself as a performer, on an island where her facial expressions end up the only usable or adequate tool.

Zhu clearly has something, or else she wouldn’t have conceived of a film where a psychological journey bubbles so fervently beneath the surface. She just needs to figure out how to effectively access and portray her subtext—and make us feel it—rather than simply telling us it might exist.