Bunny Lake Is Missing - Plot

Plot

American single mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) has just come to England from the United States with her 4-year-old daughter Felicia, whom she has nicknamed Bunny, to settle in London with her journalist brother Stephen (Keir Dullea). After the first morning at Bunny's new school, The Little People's Garden, Ann comes to fetch her, but Bunny is not there and nobody can remember even having seen her.

Police Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) faces an array of suspects in Bunny's disappearance, including Ann's landlord, aging writer and broadcaster Horatio Wilson (Noël Coward), who lets himself into the Lakes' new apartment as he pleases and is a whip-loving sadomasochist. Retired teacher Ada Ford (Martita Hunt) lives on the school's top floor and collects recordings of children's nightmares. Ada tells Newhouse she thinks there is something "very unusual" about Ann's brother Stephen. Stephen acts aggressively towards Newhouse, threatening to create a public scandal through his resources as a reporter unless the police quickly find Bunny.

Ann and Stephen then tell the police that the girl's passport and all of her belongings have vanished that same day in a mysterious burglary. The school authorities in turn report that they had never received a tuition check for a Bunny Lake. When Stephen lets slip that as a young girl Ann had an imaginary friend she called Bunny, Newhouse begins to wonder whether Bunny Lake ever really existed.

At her wits' end from not being believed, Ann suddenly recalls that before Bunny's disappearance, the girl's doll had been taken in for repair. She sets off across nighttime London to try to get it back: The police will have to believe her if she can show them that.

In the film's surprise denouement, Stephen has followed Ann to the "doll hospital." Seeming less-than-pleased that she has found the doll, he sets it afire while she's upstairs paying the repairman; in the light from the flames, his face takes on a mad look. Ann is shocked when she comes down and sees what he has done, but he immediately strikes her, knocking her out. He checks her into a hospital, claiming she hit her head at home, but she manages to escape. She finds him retrieving a drugged Bunny from the boot of his car, where he has evidently kept her all day. He clearly intends to murder the child.

When Newhouse continues to investigate and finds no record of Bunny on the passenger list on the day Stephen said they arrived, he suddenly remembers that Ann had mentioned another date and Stephen had corrected her. He asks for records for the date Ann gave.

Meanwhile, realizing that Stephen is insane, Ann tries to distract and reassure her brother, calling him "Stevie" and playing ever more frantic games from their childhood. Their dialogue hints at the film's earlier suggestions of incestuous feelings between them. Steven deeply resented Bunny's father, Ann's former boyfriend ("just a boy I knew from school who took me to dances," she had told authorities), and Bunny's existence reminds him of having "lost" his sister in this way. In a last-ditch effort to keep him away from Bunny, Ann makes Stephen push her higher and higher on a swing, and finally Newhouse and other policemen arrive and take Stephen into custody. He watches as Ann carries Bunny safely away. Ann's endless day is over.