After years of boundary-pushing success in television, writer/director Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, multiple Star Trek series) finally gets a crack at his first feature film with the darkly inventive Dust Bunny, which concerns 10-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) who believes there’s a monster under her bed. More than once, Aurora hides under the covers while an unseen creature devours anyone dumb enough to step on the floor in her bedroom, including her parents; she never sees it happen, but the noises seem unmistakable.
Aurora has a mysterious neighbor (simply referred to in the credits as “Intriguing Neighbor” and played by the great Mads Mikkelsen) who turns out to be a hitman who kills real-life monsters (the human kind) for his boss Laverne (Sigourney Weaver). When Aurora discovers what he does, she wants to procure his services and help her kill the monster under the floorboards of her family’s apartment. He’s convinced that, in fact, her parents were killed by other hitmen who were looking for him, and out of guilt, he agrees to help her. But Laverne doesn’t like the idea that this little kid knows her employee’s face, so she hires other killers, including one called Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man (David Dastmalchian), to kill Aurora, forcing Mikkelsen’s character to become both killer and bodyguard.
Meanwhile, the film’s big mystery is whether there actually is a carnivorous monster running amuck under the floor, or if Aurora is simply imagining what are otherwise the normal sounds of murder. The noises she hears would lead us to believe it’s real, but since there’s no visible damage to the floors, Mikkelsn believes it’s simply her imagination. This being a film by Fuller, who inevitably goes for the darkest corners of creativity, you know where to place your bets. He is also a director who leans into psychological intrigue, and perhaps Dust Bunny is about two people trying to help each other exorcise their own personal monsters during their time together.
In their struggle to find the truth, they are helped by Brenda (Sheila Atim), supposedly a child services worker who is anything but. Is she there to kill Mikkelsen? Or is she there to actually help them discover what the actual hell is going on? The truth is wholly satisfying, wonderfully gruesome, and something of a modern-day fairy tale, complete with life lessons and a subtext of empowerment for young Aurora. If even one of the actors in Dust Bunny were on the wrong page tonally, the whole exercise would come crumbling down, but thankfully, the twisted fun is maintained by everyone throughout, and that helps bring the film in for a satisfying landing, with Mikkelsen being the strong, calming force at the center while chaos spins around them uncontrollably. I just wanted this film to be strong enough to allow Fuller to make more movies, because he’s one of the most inventive genre filmmakers working today, and I’m desperate to see what he brings us next.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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