Amid the rise of xenophobic and hyper nationalistic movements around the world, more than a few societies appear to be going through a collective identity crisis. Grappling with historic influxes of immigrants, many communities are learning in real-time just how much (or how little) tolerance they can summon for people and lifestyles foreign from their own. To brilliant comedic effect, today’s Staff Pick Premiere borrows the classic trope of feuding neighbors and repurposes it to say something more profound. Despite its eye catching title and equally raunchy premise, ‘Fucking Bunnies’ by Teemu Niukkanen makes keen observations about the capacity for intolerance that lives within each of us, even among our most seemingly open-minded neighbors.
Set in the sort of utopian public housing development celebrated by social democrats everywhere, though only seeming to exist in Nordic countries (in this case Finland), Raimo lives a dignified and peaceful middle-class existence until his world is upended by the entrance of a new neighbor, Maki, the charismatic leader of a satanic sex cult. Despite Raimo’s self-professed sympathy toward Finland’s immigrant and refugee community, he can’t seem to bring himself to embrace the native-born Satanist living next-door. According to director Niukkanen, “Raimo is the person who likes to project himself as someone who is very open-minded and liberal. It’s easy because everyone genuinely different has always remained on the pages of newspapers. Now he has to face his own prejudices that lie deep within.”
In the current cinematic landscape, there is hardly a shortage of material addressing the backlash to immigration within our societies and rightfully so. More often than not, however, onscreen representations of the conflict are typically reduced to some version of a sanctimonious and two-dimensional cliché, in which the battle between good and evil plays out between helpless migrants and boot-clad neo Nazis. Given this paradigm, audiences can’t be faulted for having some degree of fatigue for these stories. What makes ‘Fucking Bunnies’ such a welcome and refreshing addition to the conversation surrounding intolerance is its ability to harness its absurd and hilarious premise to usher the audience into a proverbial hall of mirrors, beckoning each of us to engage in a healthy dose of self-reflection without pointing any fingers.
