Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Bunny Lake Is Missing
1965 · Otto Preminger · Bunny Lake Is Missing on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera follow characters instead of cutting to them. (camera)
Preminger and Coop favor sustained takes that move through rooms and corridors with the actors, rather than cutting in for a reaction shot whenever something happens.
Payoff: The style keeps you at an investigator's distance instead of telling you how to feel. In the reading: dicisign. Deleuze calls this a dicisign: we feel the camera's own watching, as cool and neutral as a policeman's, laid over what we see.
Watch every room Ann searches for a trace of Bunny. (setting)
The nursery school, the flat, and a hospital full of broken dolls each turn up substitutes or absences instead of any actual sign of her daughter.
Payoff: Every location becomes evidence of nothing, which the film treats as evidence in itself.
Watch Ann get dwarfed by large, mostly empty rooms. (light)
The widescreen frame keeps stretching around her in under-populated interiors, hard white walls and deep shadow, so the space itself looks too big for what little is in it.
Payoff: The emptiness of the rooms starts to feel like the film's actual subject.
Listen for pop music playing while dread keeps building. (sound)
A band plays on a pub television a few feet from Ann's search, ordinary swinging London carrying on cheerfully right beside a woman losing her daughter and possibly her mind.
Payoff: The cheerful music never once slows down to match what is actually happening around it.
Watch Ann for reasons to both believe and doubt her. (performance)
Lynley plays her sympathetic enough to earn your belief and unstable enough to license real doubt, the same performance serving two completely different possible stories.
Payoff: The same footage works for both a conspiracy and a delusion without changing a single choice.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch every room Ann enters for what is missing from it.