Katarina Zhu has made one feature and she made almost all of it herself: wrote it, directed it, produced it and played the lead. Bunnylovr shows a filmmaker who understands faces and lit rooms and has not yet learned to build a story around them.
Fi1m perspective
The image we keep from Bunnylovr (2026) is a woman closing a laptop. Rebecca has spent the evening smiling for strangers who pay her to smile, and Katarina Zhu, who plays her as well as having written, directed and produced the film, lets the smile go a beat after the screen goes dark, so that we watch the effort leave her face. It is a small thing done precisely, and small things done precisely are what Zhu has to offer so far.
She came to it the long way round. Zhu trained as an actor at NYU Tisch, and when the parts did not arrive she started writing, directing and editing her own shorts, among them Silver Lake Cleaners (2022). Bunnylovr is the feature that grew out of that habit, produced with Rachel Sennott, and it is drawn partly from Zhu's own life: a Chinese-American woman in New York, alone in a lit room, performing for people she will never meet. She has said she was interested in "exploring female sexuality and the shame surrounding it", and the film is at its best when it takes that seriously and at its worst when it goes quiet and hopes we will do the thinking.
What Zhu can do is faces and rooms. Her own performance gives the camera very little on purpose, and the withholding pays off in the scenes with Perry Yung as Rebecca's father, a man who has rehearsed an apology for years and cannot get it out. We did not expect to be moved by two people failing to talk in a kitchen, and we were; when he asks about her work and she tells him the truth, and he nods and changes the subject, the film finds the want that the rest of it keeps misplacing. What Zhu cannot yet do is shape. At 86 minutes the film still drifts, and it ends roughly where a second draft might have begun. The reviews so far are divided down the middle, and we scored it 58, which is where we land on a debut that knows its woman and not her story.
A producer who is also the writer, the director and the star has nobody to argue with, and Bunnylovr feels like a film that was not argued with enough. We would see Zhu's second feature early, and we would be happier still if someone other than Zhu were holding the script.
Biography
Katarina Zhu is an American actor, writer and director. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in acting in 2018, having studied at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
Zhu made her feature directorial debut with Bunnylovr (2025), which she also wrote, produced and starred in as Rebecca, a camgirl navigating personal relationships in New York. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received a theatrical release in 2026. She has previously directed and written short films including Silver Lake Cleaners (2022).
