One of BUNNYLOVER’s most unsettling scenes comes when camgirl Rebecca, played by writer and director Katarina Zhu, is asked to do something to a bunny that one of her clients, John, has gifted her. It’s a power play, and the bunny itself is totally defenceless – making fertile ground for Zhu to explore how young women’s relationship to sexuality is shaped by existing online. “To me, something telling about someone’s character is how they treat an animal when they’re alone with it,“ she says. 

At first glance, BUNNYLOVR looks cute – it has romantic colour-grading, a sad girl soundtrack and features Rachel Sennott as Rebecca’s privileged but caring best friend. (And, of course, there’s a fluffy bunny in all the marketing shots). But the semi-autobiographical film, which made its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, touches on some real and often uncomfortable feelings. While it captures Zhu’s own feelings of loneliness, grief and shame, it's also about the connective potential of friendships, drawing from her own real-life friendship with Sennott. “I think it can be easier to self-isolate, wrap yourself in this cocoon and find solace and community online,” she says. “The thing that has sustained me the most throughout my life is my female friendships.”

Below, Zhu discusses writing about her loneliness, how the internet shapes sexuality, pulling from “sourceless shame” and using a bunny to play out online power dynamics.

Where did the idea for BUNNYLOVR come from? It is semi-autobiographical, correct?

Katarina Zhu: Totally. I started to think about the seeds of the movie in 2020, when I was living at home alone with my mum in my childhood home. It was the middle of the pandemic, and I was going through this breakup, so I was deeply, deeply lonely. The loneliest I’ve ever been in my entire life. My existing connections were all digital, and so that’s the genesis of the script. From there, I just kept building it out over three or so years until I finally felt like I had enough to write a script.

What about the camgirl element? 

Katarina Zhu: I was really interested in exploring female sexuality and the shame surrounding it. At the same time, I was interested in how our online personas and how much of how we experience sex, as someone who was born in 1995 and grew up on the internet, is through a screen. My sexual development was formed by the internet, basically. Camming was the perfect intersection of those things. It wasn’t pulled directly from my life; it was more researched. 

And what did that research look like?

Katarina Zhu: Talking to camgirls. Having camgirls read the script. And, honestly. Just watching camgirls and experiencing what it’s like to be in those rooms as a participant. 

I’m also super curious about where and how the bunny came into it. 

Katarina Zhu: The thing about bunnies is that they’re prey animals. So they’re quite defenceless. A cat can do some fucking damage with their claws. A dog can tear you to pieces if it wants to. A bunny is at the mercy of the person that it’s with. There’s this thing happening with cute girls and their bunnies in the last couple of years online. I think there’s a reason for that, and maybe it’s the softness and defenselessness of a bunny that makes a young woman gravitate towards it. Also, growing up, I loved bunnies, which was probably a subconscious thing in the back of my mind.

This is your directorial debut, and you also starred in it. How was that? 

Katarina Zhu: It was a lot, but I have to give a lot of credit to my crew. One of my producers, Ani Schroeter, had just come from another film where it was a writer, director, and actor, so she was like, ‘I want you to be able to walk on set and only think about acting’. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but she and the rest of my crew did their best for that to happen, and it made it so much easier for me to do my job. 

The soundtrack of this film was so good. Was some of it from your playlists? 

Katarina Zhu: Soundtracks are everything to me. My favourite experience is when you go see a movie, and you hear a song that you’ve heard before but in a different context, and it takes on this whole new life and emotional depth, and it makes you like the song in a different way. There are all these songs I might now organically choose to put on, but because of a movie, it makes me love them so much more. So, yeah, each song comes directly from a moment in my life. 

There’s this thing happening with cute girls and their bunnies in the last couple of years online. I think there’s a reason for that, and maybe it’s the softness and defenselessness of a bunny that makes a young woman gravitate towards it

The film follows a toxic relationship with one of Rebecca’s clients. As the writer and actor, what do you think drew her to him? I feel she almost spoke to him as if it were a therapy session. 

Katarina Zhu: I was really interested in exploring the space when you are so deeply lonely and heartbroken that you are so much more willing to give people a chance who you might not normally. You are desperate for any sort of connection or validation. So, what draws her to this guy is feeling chosen. There’s something about him choosing her when she’s so low that feels like salvation, in a way. 

We also see Rebecca grappling with feelings that she is a bad person. 

Katarina Zhu: In Nymphomaniac, Charlotte Gainsbourg plays this hypersexual woman, and has a line where she’s like, ‘I’m a bad person. I’m an awful person’. I think that was the first time I had seen a young woman in a film, who didn’t seem that bad, say something like that. And I guess I’ve always felt that. That’s the thing where I’m pulling directly from myself, and some maybe inherent but unidentifiable guilt. 

In between the loneliness and guilt, Rebecca is also rekindling a relationship with her estranged, dying father. What made you want to pair this exploration of sexuality with grief?

Katarina Zhu: It’s all intertwined. They all feed into each other, and I do believe my relationship with my dad, or lack thereof, directly feeds into my romantic life and friendships. Also, my relationship with my mom. I think that’s a big unspoken thing: if you don’t have a stable relationship with either of your parents, how does this impact your relationships, romantic or otherwise? I wanted to present a really holistic, 360-degree view of this young woman’s life because, oftentimes, with movies about camgirls, you see their life through the lens of their job but not outside of it. In BUNNYLOVR, I wanted to treat each area of her life with equal weight. The grief part is based on my own estrangement with my dad, but he’s still alive. I’ve had to grieve him while he’s still walking around. 

Do you think Rebecca sees herself in the bunny?

Katarina Zhu: The bunny is totally a metaphor, but when I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking about that at all. It was so stream of consciousness, and I was just cherry-picking all of the things that were naturally calling out to me. Afterwards, a year later, I stepped back and was like, ‘That’s totally what I was doing, but I didn’t realise it’. You can project Rebecca onto the bunny as she starts to learn how to protect and take care of herself. 

BUNNYLOVR on TVOD is out now on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home