Women Without Kids Get the Monster Movie Treatment in 1965’s ‘Bunny Lake Is Missing’
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.
First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.
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Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.
The Pitch: Otto Preminger Plays New Games in Widescreen
By the discerning standards of IndieWire After Dark, there’s nothing too salacious or gruesome going on in “Bunny Lake Is Missing.” Instead, it’s Otto Preminger’s camera that’s nasty here. This is, first, a gorgeously shot movie, and one that doesn’t just rely on one camera or staging approach to yank us into its mystery and hold us there against our will.
There are plenty of classic Preminger long takes, of course, with the kind of diabolical dolly work that starts out feeling almost pedestrian and becomes impossibly tense by the time Preminger deigns to cut. But the director is equally exacting up close and inventive in more frantic camera moves — which feels truly wild given there was no ALEXA Mini option on offer in 1965. There were a couple of moments on this rewatch where the staging provides such a clear sense of point-counterpoint, cat-and-mouse danger within the same frame that I yelled, “The Widescreen!” aloud to my empty apartment.
Which is not how you should watch “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” if you can help it. This is a bully’s movie, by which I mean that I and my insufferable college film major friends saw it, were blown away by it, and then immediately wanted to show it to other, unsuspecting people and savor their reactions to it. I think we did this three separate times.
It’s not so much that the first two thirds of the movie lull you into a false sense of what you’re watching and then there’s a turn. The first two thirds of “Bunny Lake Is Missing” are instead indescribably just off-kilter; it’s full of British weirdos that are having so much fun being just creepy enough… that even though the ultimate twist is callable, there’s a point where it feels like truly anything can happen.
I’m intentionally being cagey about the plot, but in a lot of ways the film does what it says on the tin. The immense Carol Lynley plays Ann Lake, newly arrived in England. Her brother Steven (Keir Dullea) is already based there, and snaps into action to help Ann when, going to pick up her daughter Bunny (Suky Appleby) from daycare, she finds that no one at the overworked and understaffed early childhood education center (some things haven’t changed) can remember Bunny being there. Laurence Olivier plays a police inspector assigned to the missing persons case, and he has many opportunities to glare most Britishly when it appears there is no evidence for Bunny existing at all.
When people know about the film, usually it’s followed by fun facts about its marketing campaign. This was a kind of buzzy, cringe crossover event with British rock band The Zombies. In addition to a bespoke song and in-film cameos of them performing said number, The Zombies recorded a custom “Bunny Lake Is Missing” trailer in which they shout-croon at audiences to “Come! On! Time!!!” and not tell their friends about the twist.
That cajoling failed hard in the age before spoilers were so heavily policed, and “Bunny Lake Is Missing” flopped at the box office. But one need only look at how integral needledrops are to some films now (cough, “Deadpool and Wolverine,” cough) to see Preminger playing with an idea that was here to stay. Certain insufferable college film majors (this writer) could expand further on what Preminger was ahead of the curve on, and wax poetic about the on location filming or the Saul Bass-designed opening credits or the collection of character actors getting to play strange in a way that even Alfred Hitchcock would probably throw out as too much.
But “Bunny Lake Is Missing” should be known for Lynley’s and Dullea’s performances, too. So much hinges on Dullea’s physicality, he deserves his flowers for how he moves through Preminger’s precariously balanced compositions. And at the end of the day, it’s Lynley’s panic and determination in the face of endless gaslighting that cements Preminger’s camerawork and makes the film feel like the paranoid ride that it is. After all, there’s nothing more dangerous than a woman. —SS
The Aftermath: At Least She’ll Keep Her (American) Voting Rights
They say it takes a village to raise a child — but how many assholes must a single woman encounter before she rightly burns that village to the ground?
Countless horror movies make women question their own sanity. “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death,” an old After Dark favorite, comes to mind among others. Dramas set in police stations tend to do the same, with incredulous detectives and attorneys badgering widows, witnesses, and even victims with zero consideration for the consequences. For the most part, audiences take that in stride. Gaslighting isn’t restricted to one genre and most stories are made more interesting by characters we’re not sure we can trust.
Still, “Bunny Lake Is Missing” demonstrates an especially striking insidiousness when you consider how it makes us doubt the heroine. From the jump, it’s plain to see that the titular Bunny Lake is real and Ann is indeed a woman with a child. We see the toothbrush, the toys, the countless clues, even the shame Ann feels over her daughter being “illegitimate.” Others do too. And yet, despite multiple red herrings flopping around on screen (Martita Hunt! Lucie Mannheim! Noel Coward! I love you all!), it’s easier to believe a loving brother could be covering up for his crazy sister than to trust what’s right in front of our eyes.
There’s a special kind of worldly cleverness to the societal manipulation at play here — a conspiracy so intertwined with the West’s never-ending culture wars that it could only come from a truly fucked up journalist. Even with almost 60 years of human history between me and Preminger’s marketing, I bought into the question he wanted me to ask against my better instincts. I took note of the cook’s shifty hatred of parents, the retired educator’s “Suspiria” adjacence, and the landlord’s predatory pursuit of a woman he thought was childfree. Nevertheless, I wondered the very thing I fear anyone every asking about me: Is this woman a mother… or a monster?
Every step of the way Olivier’s Superintendent Newhouse and Dullea’s surprise villain Steven — both critically men in every sense of the word that matters — nudged me to interrogate Ann’s sanity. Staying sympathetic while also acting maybe just a touch nuts isn’t easy, but even lost in Lynley’s mesmeric talents, I waited for a fa?ade that wasn’t a fa?ade to come crumbling down because I was told to. When the terrified mom got drunk (nice police work there, Laurence), her eyes promised hysteria. Searching deeper, there was only grief. Who first introduced the idea that the police might think Bunny never existed? Was it Ann or Steven? Both answers seem in their own way profoundly tragic.
I can’t watch this kind of performance without thinking about Angelina Jolie in “The Changeling.” The remake hit theaters when I wasn’t even a teenager, and a bone-deep love of “Tomb Raider” prompted me to watch it in secret when I was too young. That trembling red lip and Jolie’s eyes, brimming with tears I recognized from the women in my own life, haunt me to this day. The terrifying final act of “Bunny Lake Is Missing” now shares that metaphoric shed in my cinematic memory. With every jarring trampoline jump, Ann and Bunny survive by playing along. It’s that same fear — of being forgotten, of being cast out, of deserving to die — that has pushed women to have babies they don’t want for centuries. If they do want kids but can’t be bothered with a husband? Well, that’s just madness.
After Dark selections aren’t always topical, but with the wildly entertaining presidential election roaring in the background, “Bunny Lake Is Missing” feels painfully appropriate. In 2021, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance floated the idea that people with children should have more voting power than people without.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” he said in speech at an event hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. (Also that year, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance made disparaging comments about so-called “childless cat ladies who are miserable,” to which I will only say — David Lowell Rich’s “Eye of the Cat” is for sure my cat’s favorite film.)
Expats Ann and Bunny would have to voyage back across the Atlantic to benefit, but there’s a perverse joy in knowing that our crazy lady would have double the voting rights in Vance’s hypothetical. Meanwhile, the unstable, underlit, and critically unmarried Steven would be forced to accept the lesser voting rights of a quintessentially batshit bachelor.
Returned to the stunning ripped paper credits styling that started it all, the final shot of “Bunny Lake Is Missing” reveals a portrait of mother and daughter. They’re a family of two, but the paper doll silhouetting them reads differently in an age when we may finally elect our first female president. Personhood is denoted by the societal roles we fill no more than parenthood is denoted by giving birth. We are all worthy of a vote, worthy of being searched for, worthy of being treated as “real” — whether Bunny is missed or not. —AF
Those brave enough to join in on the fun can stream “Bunny Lake Is Missing” free on Tubi. It’s also available to buy and rent on most VOD platforms. IndieWire After Dark publishes midnight movie recommendations at 11:59 p.m. ET every Friday. Read more of our deranged suggestions…
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