It’s unlikely you will ever have seen anything like The Bunny Game before, or will want to again. A film too strong and dark for many tastes, it’s undeniably brilliant at what it does. But couldn’t it do it elsewhere?
Facetiousness to one side, The Bunny Game gets the thumbs up from the likes of horror sage Eli Roth, who loves it, and the thumbs down from the UK’s British Board of Film Classification, which refused to give it a certificate. The BBFC thought the film likely to “risk harm to individuals” (a line from its guidelines) due to its focus on “the unremitting sexual and physical abuse of a helpless woman” (a line from its rationale for rejecting the film).
So much real horror in the world and so many horror movies and yet rarely do they ever connect. Director Adam Rehmeier makes sure we understand what he’s about in his opening shot, of a woman with her head in a plastic bag struggling to breathe. He metaphorically pulls back and gives us a rapid-fire montage of this poor soul, clearly a sex worker of some sort, sucking a man’s penis, choking on it, sobbing, sucking some more, snorting lines of something white, more sobbing, being paid in cash. It’s not meant to look like fun.
Then, in what’s not much more than a wordless flickerbook, we get a larger picture of this woman, billed as Bunny though never named, and her daily round. A blowjob next to a dumpster. Being roughly abused in a motel room. More drugs. More crying. Naked. Rehmeier pulls back yet further and we see Bunny off duty: a shock of blond hair with dark roots showing, kohl eyes (frequently teary), tattoos, tottering around urban wastelands in extremely high heels, smoking like a 1930s movie star. Glamorous, in a street way.
And then Bunny is picked up by the man, an unnamed trucker (billed as Hog), who will torment her in the back of his specially adapted trailer in an “unremitting sexual and physical” display of almost relentless gruesomeness for the rest of the film. Play with fire and eventually you get burnt? Rehmeier’s film appears to make this point abundantly clearly.
Rehmeier shoots it all in a stark black and white, borrowing his rapid-fire editing style from Godard one minute, Eisenstein the next, and then dropping in Dreyer-like “beauty” shots which draw a connection between Bunny and Joan of Arc – especially once Hog (Jeff Renfro) shaves Bunny’s head and pulls out the blowtorch.
For all the unpleasantness of the imagery, it’s mostly done by suggestion and crash editing. The most disturbing bits come when a drugged-unconscious Bunny is being fiddled with by Hog. He sniffs and licks her, spits on her, cuts off her clothes and runs the dull side of his knife blade over her body. In fuzzy flashback to another woman (not sure if it’s Drettie Page billed as “Martyr”, or Coriander Womack aka “Victim”) being treated similarly we see that Hog has done this sort of thing before.
So little dialogue, so much sobbing and crying. What an all-in performance by Rodleen Getsic, who claimed that Bunny’s story is, in some way, her own – the name “Getsic” tattooed down Bunny’s arm reinforces the idea.
The total effect is like a grim promo video for an extended death-metal thrash and if there’s a quibble it’s that Rehmeier has run out of material – but he knows he has – before the end. It’s undeniably powerful, brilliantly made, with acting that’s off the scale for commitment.
How remarkable that Rehmeier eventually gave us the delightful Dinner in America, a goofy outsider comedy. More remarkable, though, is the lack of a certificate, as if The Bunny Game were a snuff movie, when it’s all done with the modern equivalent of smoke and mirrors. Though that undoubtedly hurt Rehmeier’s film financially, in the UK at least, it’s also undeniable proof of its artistic success. A horror film that’s horrifying, as horror is obviously not meant to be.
The Bunny Game – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
