“Love inflicts the most terrible injuries”. Thoughts On Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing.

I discovered Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing at the weekend. The film, an unquestionable masterpiece of suspense cinema, was an embarrassing gap in my viewing of a director whose work I admire a great deal. Advise And Consent is as great a movie about the machinations of politics as has ever been made, while Anatomy Of A Murder does similar for the pursuit of justice. With Bunny Lake Is Missing Preminger transplanted his filmic work to the the UK, and a London in the midst of swingin’, a fact made clear by the prominent placement of the band The Zombies on television screens at one point in the movie. Televisual attractions aside though, Bunny Lake Is Missing is the kind of picture that could take place anywhere, at any time. It has this kind of Hitchcockian appeal, where the ordinary is rendered ever so slightly off-quirk, and where extraordinary drama is wrung from the most ordinary of situations.

Here in Bunny Lake Is Missing the seemingly ordinary situation involves the disappearance of a young American girl, recently migrated to London, and the investigation in to said disappearance by a police force headed up by Laurence Olivier. As things spiral, as they so often do, questions about the mental state of the films protagonist, Bunny’s mother, played by Carol Lynley, are raised, and the film becomes more concerned with being an exploration of the state of reality than it does a regular procedural drama. There are parallels to be drawn between Preminger’s movie and Olivier Assayas’ upcoming Personal Shopper, which opens later this month, while the off-kilter, fairytale-esque tone brings to minds Serge Bourguignon’s Sundays And Cybele.

It’s perhaps appropriate that I, a confessed Preminger-head, was late coming to Bunny Lake Is Missing, given that the film was written off by critics and even the director himself upon its initial release in 1965 (Bar Andrew Sarris, who referred to the film as one of Preminger’s four masterpieces of “ambiguity and objectivity”). This sense of under-appreciation has followed the film around for the past fifty years, but there’s a case to be made in praise of a standard of cultural absence. Thanks to the anominymity granted to such fare the twists and turns of Bunny Lake Is Missing are largely protected from pop re-appropriation. Unlike a picture such as Hitchcock’s Psycho, or Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, where ubiquity has actively harmed a film’s wider profile, rendering every minute detail notable and essentially in the public domain for fun to be made of and routinely spoiled, the outcome of Preminger’s film remains intact, ready for curious viewers to stumble in to.