‘Dust Bunny’ Review: Bryan Fuller’s Hybrid Fantasy-Action-Horror Fable Has an Endearingly Childlike Sense of Enchantment [B] TIFF

There’s not much talking at the beginning of Dust Bunny. The opening 15 minutes of the long-awaited feature-length film from cult favorite TV writer Bryan Fuller takes strides to establish its singular tone wordlessly, introducing a young girl named Aurora (Sophie Sloan) and establishing her classically childlike situation: she’s scared of a monster under her bed. She’s also fixated on her enigmatic neighbor, a nameless man played by Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal collaborator Mads Mikkelsen. Aurora is so fascinated by him she follows him to Chinatown, wandering through her dreamlike world, and sees him efficiently take down a bunch of goons in ultra-stylized silhouetted fluidity. Later, she comes home, and the monster under her bed eats her parents. 

Such is the strange trajectory of Fuller’s curious creation, which amalgamates so many reference points of genre and fantasy fare with such chutzpah that it turns into something all its own. Even when you think you may have a handle on how the construction of this is going to look, it throws an additional curveball of artistic influence into the mix. For example, when Aurora approaches her martial arts-fighting neighbor for his help in killing her ravenous monster, it becomes clear that Mikkelsen is part of an underground ring of contract killers that operate within underground networks of individuals with storied, tense relationships and steely gunplay precision. The best way to explain all of these action/crime/fantasy/horror elements coalescing is that it’s as if there was a Goosebumps episode written in collaboration between Roald Dahl, Lewis Carrol, and Jim Henson that operated as a mix between John Wick and Man on Fire, and was also shot with the wide-eyed, storybook wonder of Hugo or the exaggerated stylization of youthful dark fantasy from A Series of Unfortunate Events.

That’s a lot of specific, potentially contrasting milieu to throw together, so the biggest surprise of Dust Bunny is how often it manages to build something relatively robust amid its precarious foundation. Once the script begins to speak up, Mikkelsen and the young Sloan are thrown into a classic character dynamic that helps to ground the more hectic, askew developments of the story. It turns out Aurora has already been through several sets of parents that have been lost to the insatiable beast lurking beneath the floorboards and, after seeing something strange at Mikkelsen’s battle in Chinatown, she believes that he’s a monster hunter that will be able to solve her little issue.

The problem is that Mikkelsen doesn’t kill actual monsters and he, like the previous adults in Aurora’s life, believes her stories are the childish fancies of a girl with an overactive imagination. His monsters are more plausible: other human beings he’s hired to take out. But he finds himself caught in acting as her protector when other members of his clandestine order of assassins begin to intrude on Aurora’s life and, eventually, when he comes to suspect that Aurora may not be imagining as much as he thinks.

As Dust Bunny moves through its plot and attempts to put in the legwork to detail more specificities of its universe, it loses some of its balance. Aurora is drawn into the dangerous world of her new neighbor, accompanying him in a meeting with the mysterious Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), an entity whose relationship to Mikkelsen is jarringly unexplained, existing to fulfill the archetype of a stern handler, or a turncoat associate working to satisfy her own interests. She epitomizes the fact that Dust Bunny’s cramming all of its wide-ranging ideas into a tight 100-minute package means it has to sacrifice elements of specificity. It’s the same case when we’re introduced to a rival squad of goons led by David Dastmalchain, whose purpose starts and ends at acting as an additional wrinkle to the climax and helping to fulfill the broad details of what an audience would expect from the pulpy plot of an action crime movie.

That includes Mikkelsen’s performance, doing his best job solemnly mugging for the camera and stoically mumbling through his lines in his cutesy guardian relationship with Aurora. He’s coolly funny, accentuating the absurdities of the script by downplaying them, and allowing the film to plant its feet in multiple different forms of reality. After all, he doesn’t quite believe Aurora’s story, and the filmmaking underlines the fact that this could simply all be in her head with the fantastical subjectivity of her character. She’s a young girl who seemingly experiences magical goings-on in her building and city, as the camera careens and glides around warm dayglo and mystic, dark color palettes that contribute an enchanted quality befitting of a children’s fantasy movie, and the movie encourages the question of whether or not this is is all just in her head.

Those fantastical elements are when the film is at its strongest, and things really perk up once Fuller stops withholding his true intentions. Rest assured, Dust Bunny does reach a point that necessitates the work of puppeteers and CGI creature design, the two visual arts striking a nice balance to bring a rip-roaring climax to life, which includes lots of monstrous chomping, close-range apartment shootouts, and Weaver weighing a pair of high-heel pistols. Though Dust Bunny looks to develop a level of cryptic intrigue in its middle portion, one can’t help but wonder what a version of this movie that leaned more consistently into its final form may have looked like.

It’s for the same reason that it’s a little hard to pinpoint who exactly Dust Bunny is made for. Intermingling children’s movie frivolity, horror movie frights, and action movie violence into one bewildering cocktail means that it is simultaneously meant for multiple differing demographics, and therefore also none of them. In its greatest stretches, it evokes the type of gateway horror movie that would get kids into genre movies for the first time, capturing the essence of a film that’s just transgressive enough that, if you’re young enough, you feel like you got away with seeing it while not being upsetting enough to be genuinely scarring. The violence in Dust Bunny is very consciously bloodless, even if there may be a bit too much gunplay for this to break into the market of actually being marketed towards kids, who may be bored by the weird middle stretch focused on the tangles of a secret assassin cabal anyway. Even still, there’s still so much inspiration on display here that it seems impossible that it wouldn’t capture some stray nugget of their imagination, as well as that of older viewers who have a more accessible knowledge of the artists and properties that Dust Bunny is riffing on. In its most successful moments, Dust Bunny makes you feel like a kid again.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where Dust Bunny had its world premiere. Roadside Attractions will release it in U.S. theaters on December 5.