Bunny Rabbit

There is something almost perversely refreshing about a post-apocalyptic film that does not immediately feel compelled to show us the end of the world. James Branson’s Bunny Rabbit, his remarkably assured feature debut, begins from the more troubling question of what comes afterwards, when catastrophe has ceased to be an event and has simply become everyday life. Australia in 2030 has been devastated by climate collapse, resources have virtually disappeared and survival has been stripped of whatever romantic associations the movies once gave it. Bunny, played with impressive restraint by Kate Wilson, belongs to a generation that never really experienced the world before its fall. She has inherited memories that are not hers, stories of ordinary life and fragments of popular culture preserved through the books and B-movies collected by her late father, played by Andy Golledge. Now alone in the shack they once shared, Bunny exists somewhere between childhood and premature old age, forced to understand violence, hunger and death long before she has had the opportunity to understand much else. Food is disappearing, animals are almost gone and even insects have become a luxury. In this world, the old joke about people eventually turning on one another has stopped being a joke: human beings may quite literally be the final available prey.

What makes Bunny Rabbit considerably more interesting than its familiar premise suggests is the way James Branson refuses to turn deprivation into spectacle alone. The influence of Mad Max and the countless exploitation films that followed it is unmistakable, but this is less a film about roaring engines and wasteland mythology than about the psychological damage created by living permanently at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Bunny has been educated by the remains of a culture that promised adventure, romance and possibility, yet none of those things appear to exist outside the pages and images left behind by her father. There is a cruel irony in that idea: old books and cheap B-movies, once disposable entertainment, have become archaeological evidence that humanity was capable of imagining something better. Aemon Barzanji’s cinematography makes excellent use of this contradiction. The ruined landscape can be strangely beautiful, but the beauty never feels comforting; it resembles the stillness of a place from which life is quietly withdrawing. The modest scale of the production consequently works in its favour. Rather than attempting to convince us that an entire continent has collapsed through expensive digital panoramas, the film concentrates on dirt, walls, bodies, dwindling supplies and the oppressive intimacy of Bunny’s shelter. The apocalypse becomes convincing because it is tactile.

That intimacy becomes increasingly unbearable when an Intruder, played by Ontrei, enters Bunny’s fragile territory. Their confrontation provides the film with its most compelling dynamic because James Branson understands that the interesting question is not simply which one of them is more dangerous. The Intruder wears his brutality openly; Bunny has learned to store hers somewhere deeper. Kate Wilson is particularly effective at suggesting the calculations occurring behind her character’s silences. Bunny is not presented as an invincible genre heroine waiting for an excuse to unleash herself, nor as an innocent victim who suddenly discovers hidden powers. She is frightening precisely because violence has become another practical skill, something to be deployed when circumstances require it. When the film erupts, it does so with genuinely startling force. The brutality is not constant, which makes its arrival far more effective: James Branson allows long stretches of unease, observation and uncomfortable conversation to accumulate before puncturing them with moments capable of changing the emotional temperature of a scene almost instantly. That restraint separates Bunny Rabbit from the kind of exploitation cinema it knowingly references. Violence may be part of its attraction as a thriller, but the film is ultimately interested in what happens to a person who grows up believing violence is simply one more form of problem-solving.

There is also a melancholy generational argument running beneath the blood and survival mechanics. Bunny has inherited a disaster she did not create, and that gives the film an uncomfortable contemporary resonance without requiring James Branson to transform it into an explicit environmental lecture. The year 2030 is close enough to make the premise sting. This is not some distant radioactive future populated by mutants and mythology; it is tomorrow with the remaining comforts removed. The most disturbing aspect of Bunny’s existence may therefore be how quickly the extraordinary has become normal to her. She can remember her father, his stories and the culture he passed down, but nostalgia cannot produce food. The film repeatedly places inherited ideals against immediate biological necessity, and Kate Wilson makes that conflict painfully credible. Her performance is quiet where another actor might have pushed for obvious intensity, allowing small gestures and watchful expressions to tell us how thoroughly Bunny has learned to assess danger. Andy Golledge, Saxon Cook and Ontrei contribute to a world in which every encounter carries the possibility of threat, but Bunny remains its emotional centre. She is simultaneously the product of a failed civilisation and one of its last witnesses, carrying scraps of the old world while becoming increasingly adapted to the terrible logic of the new one.

At 89 minutes, Bunny Rabbit is compact enough to avoid exhausting its premise and confident enough not to explain every corner of its ruined universe. Produced by Taylor Thompson through Sneaky Films, the film announces James Branson as a filmmaker with a strong instinct for atmosphere, character and the strategic use of genre conventions. There are recognisable ingredients here, certainly, and anyone familiar with Australian post-apocalyptic cinema will immediately see the lineage, but the film finds its own identity by making survival less heroic than corrosive. Its most memorable images are not simply there to demonstrate how badly civilisation has fallen; they ask what kind of civilisation might ever emerge from children who have learned only scarcity. Seen as part of the 2026 festival circuit after its October 14, 2025 premiere at SXSW Sydney and ahead of its international exposure through events including the Chattanooga Film Festival and Tubi FrightFest, Bunny Rabbit feels like exactly the sort of independent genre discovery festivals are designed to uncover: rough-edged, uncompromising and much more thoughtful than its exploitation DNA initially suggests. Kate Wilson gives the film the human pulse it needs, while James Branson turns an apparently straightforward tale of a woman defending her shelter into something bleaker — a portrait of a generation that has been handed the remains of somebody else’s world and told to survive among them. The result does not merely bite. It leaves a mark.

Bunny Rabbit
Written and directed by James Branson
Produced by Taylor Thompson
Starring: Kate Wilson, Andy Golledge, Saxon Cook, Ontrei
Cinematography: Aemon Barzanji
Edited by
Music by
Production companies: Sneaky Films
Distributed by 
Release dates: 
Running time: 89 minutes

Viewed on August 23, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)