Here’s one that came right out of nowhere.

Bunny!! is a Vietnamese flick with only one suspiciously positive review on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, as of this typing. There’s virtually nothing about this movie to be found outside its IMDb page, and even that’s pretty sparse. (The title is pretty much un-Googleable, that’s a factor.)

(Side note: From what I can tell, it looks like the vast majority of actors here are Vietnamese pop singers. Which is likely why some of them only go by a monosyllabic name.)

Yet it somehow landed in my local multiplex, so fuck it, let’s dive in.

This is the story of Hai Linh and Hai Lan (respectively played by LyLy and Van Mai Huong), two half-sisters who’ve gotten to be massively successful through offering advice to their respective audiences. Lan gives out beauty and lifestyle advice as a social influencer. Linh gives out sage relationship advice as a talk show host.

Linh has a stable and loving marriage with The Phong (Vinh Dam), a handsome and sensible businessman. Compare that to Lan’s husband (Ngoc Son, played by Tran Quoc Anh), who’s more like a “sleep in and play video games by day, drink and party all night” kind of guy. What’s worse, Lan is a vain, superficial, stubborn idiot with a nasty habit of taking the least excuse to assume that Son is cheating on her.

While all of this is going on, there’s a particular guest who comes onto Linh’s show with an interest in sharing her story. Enter Nhat “Bunny” Ha (Phao), a young woman stuck in a dreadfully abusive relationship with an obsessive narcissist (Tran Trung Kim, played by Tran Thanh). Bunny’s looking for a way out of this particular relationship, and I won’t go into details regarding precisely how. Suffice to say Bunny gets herself involved in Linh’s family and it’s all downhill from there.

(Side note: Because of the language barrier and how shockingly difficult this film is to research, I can’t guarantee that any of the above spellings are accurate. It’s likewise possible that the above character names and their respective actors might’ve been mislabeled. Sorry, folks, I did the best I could.)

Oh, and we’ve also got three comic relief relatives who contribute so little, it’s not worth the time and bother of confirming the characters’ names and actors. Nevertheless, I did appreciate having some comic relief on hand, because this one gets dark.

See, what we’ve got here is a marital infidelity plot. The major problem with marital infidelity plots is that everyone involved is an asshole. The cheating partner is an asshole for cheating. The non-cheating partner has to be an asshole or the other partner would have no plausible reason to cheat. And the side piece is an asshole if they know the cheating partner is actively cheating, as is the case here.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is precious little that pisses me off like characters making their own problems for no reason whatsoever. And that’s exactly what we’ve got here, as with any other infidelity plot. But this one kinda works.

For one thing, this whole movie is aggressively melodramatic. Every line of dialogue is overwrought and every performance goes full-tilt. Could this be a cultural thing or a language barrier? I don’t know. But it plays as if the filmmakers were fully aware of how deeply unsympathetic their characters were, and leaning into that would’ve been the sensible choice.

More importantly, these actors are all stone-cold crazy in exactly the kind of way this film needed. I totally believe that all of these characters are in over-the-top obsessive love with each other. I also totally believe that they would do terrible, awful, unspeakable things to each other because of that same love. So it helps to sell the premise.

That said, this is very much a film about how looks can be deceiving and first impressions don’t always tell the whole story. A seemingly happy marriage could have problems boiling under the surface that nobody talks about. Even between spouses, there could be problems and secrets and lies dragging one down while the other is happily oblivious.

In theory, this should take a deftly nuanced touch to sufficiently explore. And we’re dealing with characters who are each roughly as nuanced as a brick to the head. Yet somehow, again, it works.

The trick here is in the reveals. Time and time again, the filmmakers are diabolically creative in showing us what happened between the edits of a previous scene, revealing some new event or information about a character we thought we knew. And precisely because the actors are all performing over-the-top at all times, that actually does a lot to help sell the multitude of face-turns and heel-turns all throughout the picture. Paradoxically, there comes a point when it all evens out, we come to take it for granted that we don’t know the characters as well as we think we do, and we take it at face value that the characters are all much deeper than anyone realizes.

There’s no logical way that this should work. But it somehow does.

I was genuinely shocked at how invested I was in this film’s examination of lies and secrets and infidelities, when relationships are (not) worth fighting for, when redemption is (not) possible, and so on. None of that should’ve been possible with these characters, but they’re all given just enough dimension to give these topics some emotional heft. Of course, the fiendishly clever plotting and editing show there was clearly a measure of intelligence at work here, which always helps.

This certainly won’t be for all tastes, but I had a good time with Bunny!!. Sure, the characters and performances are all aggressively broad, but the more I learned about their various lies and secrets — and the more they made each other suffer for their various transgressions — they somehow grew on me. And again, it’s worth stressing how the various reveals and heel/face-turns were so much fun to watch. I might further add that the film is only two hours long, so it didn’t overstay its welcome.

It’s tough for me to recommend this for a big-screen viewing, since it’s such an obscure movie playing on so few screens. This is nothing worth going so far out of your way for. But if you happen to find it on home video, definitely give it a try.