A tenement building in the East Village of New York City. A large cast of outsized characters. Throw in a dead body, and now you’ve got a movie. Bunny, by first-time director Ben Jacobson, harnesses all of this energy for the tale of a night to remember.
The titular character, Bunny (Mo Stark, a co-writer with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis), contains multitudes. We first meet him running down a Manhattan street, blood on his clothes, his long hair disheveled from the effort. A voiceover tells us that he’s a hustler, a sex worker. As he makes his way back to his building, we start to see that this seemingly muscled tough is actually the glue that keeps the entire apartment running.
Bunny helps his neighbor get laundry downstairs. He puts up lights for the three young women hosting a party. He does what he can to help his landlord Linda, never letting language be a barrier. He’s a mensch!
It’s also his birthday, and his loving and lovely wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) wants him to celebrate. She doesn’t know about the earlier incident with the blood, and when a besuited bad guy shows up, Bunny goes from helpful to deadly and creates the cadaver in question.
For the rest of the film, Bunny and his buddy Dino (played by Jacobson himself) try to figure out how to get rid of the now-dead visitor. As they would admit, nice as they are, these aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. It’s a bit of a comedy of errors.
We meet new characters along the way. The Orthodox Jewish Airbnb guest who’s in town to meet the man of her dreams. The cops who keep hanging around and cracking wise. The two bros who couldn’t be more out of place in this ragtag world. It’s almost like an ensemble from a sitcom more than that of a gritty NYC flick.
By restricting the action almost exclusively to this one building, the audience is taken floor-to-floor on an adventure that stays engaging throughout. Bunny is a race against time and an exercise in controlled chaos. But more than that, it shows a community taking care of each other and a man at the center of it living as best as he can with kindness and empathy. It’s the very best of life in the big city.
Screens again Monday, March 10 and Thursday, March 13.
Bunny
Narrative Feature Competition, World Premiere
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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.