Review of Rabbits (2002)

[...] the rabbits remain in their unchanging world, strikingly disconnected from the rest of the film. The jagged stream of continuity that Inland Empire operates through seems to go from fragmented to entirely irrelevant, broken time to no time at all. Instead of existing at the boundaries of clashing realities and narrative levels, their segments of the film feel abandoned and almost clinical, existing outside of the flow of time, broken or not; instead of the rapid and hysterical narrative of the rest of the film, fraught with constantly-shifting external drama and poorly defined internal anxieties, a cold resignation weighs like a weighted blanket over the rabbit’s rain-soaked world [...] the flow of linear time is severed, and everything takes on the feeling of a gradually cooling physical system asymptotically approaching absolute zero more so than any kind of human drama, however abstracted or alienated. [...] The rabbit’s world feels like a dream, going on without the dreamer. If the rest of the film is subject to nightmare logic, the Rabbits are what are left of a nightmare when the dreamer wakes up and the rest of the oneiric world goes on without them, stripped of momentum or motivation and left to quietly end like unmaintained hardware. "I do not think it will be much longer now."

Among the monotone dissociation of the rest of the film, much is understandably made of the brief intrusions of activity, specially the ritualistic interludes and the ringing telephone (the single cutscene in the films entire duration,) but I find it hard to interpret these as more than brief bursts of inconsequential energy in a slowly failing system that leave almost as soon as they arrive. The trains of logic and actual activity left by the long-departed dreamer in this world still surface from time to time, but they are mere scraps of imagery and movement that trail off into nothing as soon as their residual momentum runs out, and the ceaselessly repeated non-action of the film settles back into place. The moment that I'm inclined to make the most out of, and consider the films emotional cornerstone, occurs around 18 minutes in; Suzie wordlessly sits down between Jack and Jane on the couch, and the three lean their heads together. In a film so devoid of recognizably human feelings besides a vague disconnect too tired to be called anxiety, a moment of almost tenderness is striking. Calling it sweet might be making too much of it, but the idea that an almost-comfort can be found in this exhausted, collapsed world without drive or trajectory is haunting in its own way.

It also suggests that the rabbits, rather than being empty automatons parroting their dislocated phrases and meandering blindly through their non-narrative, have some kind of interiority; they are inhabitants of their closed world rather than props in it, actual characters in an empty room where it is always raining who can find some kind of solace in each others presence. We can no longer take comfort in the possibility that these are just things that are happening without anything inside looking out from behind their eyes, however blank they may seem. To make something of the actual costumes themselves, it calls to mind rabbits in a burrow, sleeping through a harsh winter that they may or may not live to see the end of. It opens the unsettling possibility of living like this; affectless without being emotionless, exhausted without being non-present, the feeling of living in a world that is slowly ending, or might have ended a long time ago, simply stoking the ashes for lack of anything else to do.