Dust Bunny Review: Hit Men and Monsters, Oh My!

With TV shows like Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me on his résumé, it’s clear that writer-turned-director Bryan Fuller has an extraordinary knack for the quirky and somewhat macabre. However, his work can sometimes wobble between charmingly, ghoulishly cutesy and simply twee, and so his debut feature as a director, Dust Bunny suggests that the problem was that he was restricted by the confines of television. Here, he’s allowed to create an entire world that is as absurd and enchanting in equal measures. There’s a storybook charm, an almost guileless devotion to this strange and wonderful place where art nouveau architecture glows over grimy streets, and a paunchy hit man can take on supernatural forces.

The paunchy hit man in question is the star of Fuller’s Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen, as the neighbor to young Aurora (Sophie Sloan), and he may be the only solution to her problem. After all, who else can help you when the monster under your bed eats your parents and you’re left alone in an apartment that would make The City of Lost Children-era Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro weep with joy. Imagine if the furry beasts of Where the Wild Things Are accidentally abducted John Wick to their island, and you have a close approximation of Fuller’s undoubtedly unique and unexpectedly endearing twist on urban fantasy and bedtime tales. It’s a place of color-coordinated home invaders who have camouflaged themselves to match the wallpaper. At one moment, Mikkelsen is stabbing a home invader through the eye with an electric toothbrush, and the next, Aurora’s monster is swimming through the parquet flooring like Jaws through the ocean.

What exactly the monster is, well, that’s very much a secret. Sometimes it’s quite literally a dust bunny, an aggregation of detritus that somehow can stare at Aurora. Sometimes it’s small enough to live under the floorboards. Sometimes it’s huge enough to lift Aurora’s bed to the ceiling. And as far as the neighbor can tell, it’s all in her head and the real menace is rival killers who are hunting both him (for obvious reasons) and her (to less apparent ends).

Fuller sets up an age-old dichotomy: Kids make up stories to soften the nightmares, while adults ignore all possibilities of the strange and bizarre. Mikkelsen could easily be reviving the jaundiced assassin of his 2019 excursion into Wicksploitation, Polar, as the unnamed killer from across the hallway. Indeed, the only person seemingly having more fun than him is Sigourney Weaver as his fixer/wrangler/nemesis, and they’re coming at their parts in completely different ways. There’s not a scene she doesn’t devour like the dim sum that seemingly fills every dinner table, while Mikkelsen is much more purposefully restrained as the jaded old hit man. As for Sloan as Aurora, she’s the epitome of the smart and spritely child of children’s literature, like Pippi Longstocking if she was evading the mob rather than school.

In its strange and successful mixing of genres, Dust Bunny is arguably everything that Mockingbird Lane, Fuller’s misguided attempt at an edgy take on The Munsters, was not. There, he tried to force the truly horrific into a horror spoof and failed miserably. Here, he takes a story that should be horrifying – an orphaned child who turns to her murderous neighbor for assistance and revenge – and makes a fairy tale of it. After all, isn’t that what fairy tales are, a way to soften the terror of everyday life? The result is oddly, genuinely charming, and the MPAA deserves coal in its stocking for mislabeling this delightfully teen-friendly modern fable with an R instead of the PG-13 it deserves.

This article appears in December 12 • 2025.