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.
Once you have seen it
Watch Steven's protectiveness once you know how it ends. (performance)
Dullea plays the brother's care for Ann as smooth and reassuring throughout, and the ending recodes every one of those same gestures into something closer to pathological attachment.
Payoff: The same warm behavior reads completely differently once you know what it was actually protecting.
Watch how suddenly the film commits to one answer. (structure)
For most of its length the film keeps conspiracy and delusion equally possible, then in its last stretch it abandons that balance for a direct confrontation and a physical chase.
Payoff: Two hours of careful uncertainty end in the kind of decisive answer the style had been withholding. In the reading: powers of the false. Deleuze calls holding two competing versions of events equally true the powers of the false: the film finally abandons that balance and decides.
Notice the objects that keep standing in for Bunny. (setting)
Broken dolls, recorded nightmares upstairs, masks and riding crops in the landlord's rooms, all ring the search for one real child with damaged or invented substitutes for childhood.
Payoff: The film surrounds an absence with objects instead of ever filling it with the child herself. In the reading: fetish (part-object). Deleuze calls an object charged with compulsion like this a fetish: a piece torn loose from a hidden world of raw appetite underneath.
Carry this in: Watch every room Ann enters for what is missing from it.