Aimless twenty-something in a city struggles to make ends meet: it’s a tale as old as the last, current, and next recession. Rebecca, the protagonist of Bunnylovr, feels like a composite of familiar indie archetypes – = Frances Ha (2012) if she were Chinese American and a cam girl, or Lost in Translation’s (2003) Scarlett Johansson if her disillusionment stemmed from a trying father rather than Bill Murray’s unfulfilling companionship. Rebecca is lonely, lost, and unlikable – and though the first two of these traits are deeply relatable, the last is harder to forgive.

To be fair, there’s something slightly off about how Gen-Z is more broadly being represented in the zeitgeist right now – why must we always be so annoying? Yet the issue with Rebecca isn’t simply, as IndieWire argues, that she ‘has no interests, no ambitions, and no hobbies. Her apartment is plain white, with nothing on the walls.’ The deeper problem is that the film leans a bit too heavily on recognizable markers of millennial/Gen-Z malaise rather than exploring the fuller texture of a life.

It’s not exactly Rebecca’s fault, per se. In the contemporary game of pick-your-side-hustle, she’s landed on being a personal assistant, selling feet pics, and chatting with men online – one of whom eventually sends her a pet bunny to indulge a disturbing fetish. There’s a more probing film to be made about how and why Rebecca fell down this particular rabbit hole (pun intended), but Bunnylovr drops us squarely in the middle of her quarter-life crisis. Rock bottom is meeting with a ‘client’, and realizing he’s just as weird and creepy as one might suspect. As a result, Rebecca comes across as more of a symbol than a fully realized character, which makes it harder to connect with her even when her struggles are recognizable.

Still, for a writer-director-actor debut, Bunnylovr is commendable. There are flashes of real sharpness and small pockets of warmth – what better father-daughter bonding activity is there than cheating together at card games in Chinatown? – and Rachel Sennott plays mean-nice-girl more than believably. The film also gestures toward the same uneasy terrain explored by other indie films like Blue Film in grappling with the ethics and blurred boundaries of cam culture, online predation, and the emotional listlessness of digital life.

In the end, Bunnylovr is less interested in emotional transformation than in observation. The messiness of young adulthood, economic precarity, and the emptiness of transactional relationships that attempt to stand in for real intimacy – this is all well-trodden territory. Still, it’s a solid watch, and one that makes you curious to see what Katarina Zhu will direct next.