Popular reviews

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★½ 8

  Fuck!!! What a masterfully-directed mystery. Shot so beautifully and built so well, lots of perfect little misdirects and kicks to keep you in Carol Lynley’s wonderfully paranoid, stressed out shoes. Keir Dullea and Laurence Olivier are just as terrific as Lynley, and Noel Coward is having such a blast playing a real creep. That ending though... absolutely terrifying and fantastic. Can’t say much without spoiling it but my heart rate was elevated for the entire final 20 minutes.

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  Review by brat pacino ★★★★½ 1

  historically, so-called “hysterical” women have been subjected to institutionalization, lobotomies, and forced sterilization — this subtextual threat looms over our heroine annie lake’s head like miasma. horror is derived from the all-too familiar dread of not being believed.

  sorta feels like a precursor to Rosemary’s Baby (the novel was published just 2 years after this film‘s release), and definitely feels emblematic of the second-wave feminism that arose in the 60s. can’t believe i hadn’t heard of it until demi suggested we watch it! #BelieveWomen (and #BelieveDemi) canon!

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★★

  This is a tight drama that feels way ahead of its time.

  With a missing kid and incestuous undertones, it’s no wonder this was extremely shocking for the 60s. Executed perfectly by Otto Preminger, it got quite intense near the end, putting me on the edge of my seat. I wish we had a Laurence Olivier police captain series...

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  Review by Janica ★★★★ 2

  God bless the gaslighting genre when done right. I think I personally find this variation the best, certainly Otto Preminger is not the first to do it: instead of watching someone drive the female protagonist crazy, as the narrative proceeds the audience begins to doubt the sanity of the female protagonist. It is a far more interesting development, at least in terms of audience sympathy and alignment. Preminger’s long-take style, with elaborate camerawork which pivots and dollys from room to room is particularly apt for, at first, letting the audience see with their own eyes that Bunny is gone, and later, perhaps, see the spatial gaps in our heroine’s sanity.

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  Review by c h r i s 🎃 ★★★★½ 5

  This woman is crazy.
  Don’t you think we all are in one way or another?

  so beyond ahead of its time that its audience in the 60s must have been hysterical during those final 20 minutes. Bunny Lake Is Missing is as chilling to the bone as they come, a masterclass in paranoid suspense and build-up in the disbelief of a woman living a tragic lucid daymare, a mother searching for a child that no one seems to believe exists. bunny lake shakes things up with a borderline incestuous subplot to make this little movie even more unhinged by the minute, I loved all the twists and turns this managed to pull from under the rug. just, what a fucking gem this movie is, people may say it’s predictable but it unquestionably worked for me! 

  Carol Lynley playing off Laurence Olivier was easily the highlight, perfection. 

  i have all their little nightmares on my tape machine. 

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  Review by Bruno Amato Reame ★★★★★

  What is the difference between looking and seeing? A child is missing, but no one can find out what happened to her and her mother can’t even prove the little girl exists at all. Preminger’s camera follows the characters in a somewhat similar fashion to Van Sant's films like Elephant, as they explore the spaces where the little girl supposedly disappeared. Ironically, Preminger's seemingly objective mise en scène only expresses the fallibility of objectivity and trusting (superficial) facts and appearances. However, the closer the characters get to the facts, the crazier and more subjective the film becomes. At the last half hour, after we learn the truth, Bunny Lake Is Missing turns into full nightmare mode. In a mad world lucidity is not the key to certainty, insanity is.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  The question is why the inspector ever starts to doubt her. The constructed misinformation provided by the culprit doesn't really strongly point to the level of delusion Ann is allegedly experiencing. The inspector seems inclined to disbelieve. But that seems very intentional. This trap would never work if not for the presumptions of the men in this story; this trap would never work outside of patriarchy. But within it, this is an unnervingly believable premise, despite its third act ramp up to a little over-the-top.

  This is a later noir, one of those masterpieces of shadow that dwells in doorframes and hallways and gardens. It evokes a mood that is only marred by the occasional shift between Ann and the…

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  Review by Nakul ★★★★

  Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing was a fascinating, deranged & quite Hitchcock-y mystery thriller. Love the tonal shifts, and the compositions/staging/blocking are all just incredible. The last act was so unexpectedly unsettling & unhinged, it will either make or break the movie for you.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★ 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  I'm a little resistant to movies where the reveal is "Ah! He was insane!" but this is some really stunning filmmaking. Certainly influenced by Psycho, this is Hitchcock turned up to 11. The style of the movie changes as it progresses, from the nightmare of the fate of a child gone missing, to Fincher-esque procedural (Fincher certainly must have studied this movie), there are whole sequence which devote themselves not to the narrative at hand but rather the sharing and processing of information. Then finally, intense psychological thriller, where the movie is at its most formally adventurous and IMO at it's best. For one thing, there is the most terrifying hide-and-seek game one will ever see. And that opens up…

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★★

  Quite the fantastical mystery from Otto Preminger. Bunny Lake is Missing starts Innocently enough - a mother drops her daughter off for her first day at school, only to find her missing when she returns to pick her up. What's more...there seems to be no evidence that the child even exists! The film presents an intriguing situation and ramps up the tension by a number of small details - odd side characters, strange nuggets of information. The central question of where the child is - or if she even exists - hangs over everything. It's anchored by a great performance from Carol Lynley - full of grief and dismay. Her maternal position apparently undermined in the eyes of Laurence Olivier's…

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  Review by williamfaeleith ★★★★

  Kicks off with fab Saul Bass titles that lead us very quickly into a missing child situation, but does the child even exist or is she a figment of Ann Lake's (Carol Lynley) imagination. Her brother Steven (Keir Dullea) whom Ann and Bunny have come to stay with in London from America, is the only other person who can confirm Bunny's existence and he insists the police are called. Enter Superintendent Newhouse (Larry Olivier) to find out what's going on.
  Lovely black & white photography of sixties London, and a gripping mystery with a few blind alleys and some cod Freudian psychology.
  One red herring is creepy landlord Horacio Wilson (a theatrical Noël Coward) whom Sgt. Andrews (Clive Revill) doesn't think much of. He tells the superintendent:
  "Bloody pervert, if you want my opinion, sir."
  "Please Andrews, he works for the BBC."
  Ah, a time when you were beyond reproach if you worked for the BBC!

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  Review by Lara Pop ★★★½ 5

  Bunny Lake Is Missing unquestionably retains a grand position in Otto Preminger's impressive oeuvre. I consider Preminger to be a truly professional director because of his bold vision and ability of applying it in practice with a rigor and decisiveness quite demanding to keep up in a career spanning four decades; still, he somehow manages it. He lays the foundations of a meticulously balanced picture in Bunny Lake as well, bringing impeccable unity and fine-grained direction to the table.

  Oddly enough, it was this sense of balance that lulled me into brief periods of monotony, which marred the viewing experience a tiny bit. The story often lagged and the pacing felt uneven, especially during the unnecessarily elaborated and drowsy opening…