Dust Bunny (2025)
Directed by: Bryan Fuller
Premise: An eight-year-old girl (Sophie Sloan) believes that a monster lives in the floorboards of her apartment and has eaten her parents. She hires the neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen), who is a hitman, to kill the monster.
What Works: Dust Bunny has a unique and surrealistic style. The action set pieces are impressively crafted with interesting use of color and camerawork. Filmmaker Bryan Fuller is out to dazzle us and he frequently does. There is a great deal of thought put into every shot and edit. Movement is used to convey character; the way these people move through a scene tells a lot about them. In fact, there is little dialogue for long periods of the movie. The film doesn’t need it because the visuals tell us everything we need to know. Even something as mundane as a character walking through a doorway or riding an elevator are staged and shot interestingly and choreographed like a dance. The style supports the mystery. Whether the monster is real is left ambiguous through most of the movie; it might be real or it might be a childhood fantasy to rationalize violence. The ambiguity plays effectively until the final half hour. Dust Bunny also has a lot of comedy. The cast get the film’s absurd sense of humor and the style and visual filmmaking reinforces the comic tone.
What Doesn’t: The story of Dusty Bunny is rooted in the cliché of the assassin with a heart of gold who takes charge of a child. That idea has been seen in many movies and television shows and when it works, the assassin usually discovers their paternal instincts while the child matures. Not much of that happens in Dust Bunny. The assassin and the girl are only as deep as they are upon introduction and neither of them demonstrably grows over the course of the story. There is no redemption or revelation and the film doesn’t do much with its characters. Once the truth about the monster is revealed the whole film become a lot less interesting. The middle of Dusty Bunny feels padded and drawn out. Not much actually happens through this part of the film. When Dust Bunny arrives at its climax, a lot of the picture feels rushed through and new characters are introduced at the end of the picture but only so they can be killed off.
Bottom Line: Dust Bunny is stylish and entertaining. The movie is gleefully weird but there’s not much else to it and the emotional beats don’t hit very hard. Dust Bunny is television producer Bryan Fuller’s feature film directorial debut and it is a promising first movie.
Episode: #1079 (December 21, 2025)