This one seems like a no-brainer: Get one of Australia’s best working actresses, and one of, if not the, best young New Zealand actress, and put them in a movie together. Besides both Essie Davis and Thomasin McKenzie being in some absolute winners this year already, they’ve been putting in a lot of strong work over the last few years. And this film adds another notch to their respective belts, to the point where this might be my single favourite Essie Davis performance yet. As the titular Bunny King, she is mama bear personified as a hard-done-by squeegee woman who just wants to go to her daughter’s birthday party. The sheer conviction she gives with this role is incredible, perfectly portraying someone trying to make the best out of a terrible situation. Well, several terrible situations that have piled on top of each other.
There’s really only one way to describe this film’s tone and atmosphere, and it’s going to require a very specific real-life example for me to really get it across. Ever had to go to a social services office? Sitting in a waiting room, hating the fact that you’re asking for help but still needing to do so, while everyone working there and in the outside world just treats you like lazy garbage; it’s like there’s something in the air conditioning specifically designed to make you lose the will to live as you just sit there, writing on endless clipboards, breathing in the extent of your circumstances. Yeah, I’ve had to deal with such places quite a bit in my life, and while the specific scenes that take place in those offices are palpably uncomfortable, that feeling seems to stretch out across every other scene as well, leaving this inescapably tragic tone.
Even with its turn into low-key hostage thriller in the third act, the story is primarily a work of social realism; think something like Sorry We Missed You, but focusing on the unemployment side of things. And it certainly succeeds at that aim for realism, as the corners that Bunny and McKenzie’s Tonyah are backed into throughout are nothing short of heartbreaking. For all the pretences of bureaucratic institutes being there to “help” and “protect”, all they do is skim the details of these individuals and make sweeping declarations that, along with being impressively condescending, only further highlight that this system isn’t really designed to help people.
If it truly was, or at least if it succeeded at being so, being within that system wouldn’t serve as its own barrier to ever leaving it. It wouldn’t lead people to basically lie to everyone else for the sake of appearances, and be told over and over to stop bludging and just get a job, as if such an idea had never crossed the mind of people who know what that stale office air tastes like on a regular basis.
And in the face of all that opposition, all that hostility, all that genuinely reprehensible behaviour (it is quite difficult to see Erroll Shand as Tonyah’s “father” and not spit on the ground in response), Bunny is still adamant. Her sheer virtue, her protective nature, and her just being sick to death of the hoops she’s been forced to jump through, never waver, and it’s through that light that the film gets its biggest emotional reactions. Whenever someone shows genuine kindness towards her, whether it’s getting tipped at work, or being served tea and biscuits at a most trying hour, it shows the people who really want to help and protect the populace.
This New Zealand indie flick is seriously good, both as a character study of Bunny King and as a pointing-of-fingers at how flawed the social services system is. Yeah, it’s the specifically New Zealand system, but we’re neighbours of their’s and what we have isn’t that different; as thankful as I am that I could even get in a position where I could receive assistance, that comes with the grim understanding that not everyone is as fortunate. The lead performances are fantastic, and make for some of Davis and McKenzie’s best work to date, and as a feature debut for director Gaysorn Thavat, the film craft here is very strong. I eagerly look forward to where she goes from here.
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