Crew
Director/Screenplay – Bryan Fuller, Producers – Bryan Fuller, Basil Iwanyk & Erica Lee, Photography – Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, Music – Isabella Summers, Visual Effects Supervisor – Craig Lyn, Visual Effects – Anibrain, CinevisualFX (Supervisor – Anshul Mathuria), Emvision VFX Private Ltd (Supervisor – Aniruddha Mukherjee), Mas Effects & Redefine (Senior Supervisor – Eric J. Robertson, Supervisor – Amiy Shriyvastava), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Stephenson, Dust Bunny Creature – Legacy Effects (Supervisors – Shane Mahan, Lindsay MacGowan & J. Alan Scott), Prosthetics Supervisor – Gergo Lengyel, Production Design – Jeremy Reed. Production Company – Thunder Road Films/Living Dead Guy.
Cast
Sophie Sloan (Aurora), Mads Mikkelsen (Intriguing Neighbor), Sigourney Weaver (Laverne), Shelia Stim (Brenda), David Dastmalchian (Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man), Rebecca Henderson (Intimidating Woman), Line Kruse (Mother), Caspar Phillipson (Father)
Plot
Aurora lives with her foster parents but is fearful of a dust bunny monster beneath her bed. She is safe as long as she does not touch the floor. However, her foster parents do and are devoured by the dust bunny. She is witness as the upstairs neighbour takes on and defeats a Chinese long dragon. She goes to the neighbour and pays him with money taken from the church collection plate to kill the dust bunny. She is insistent that she imagined it up, while he is sceptical about the existence of any monster. He works as an assassin and instead believes that her parents may have been mistakenly killed by assassins who were sent after him. He goes to his employer Laverne who sends two assassins in to clean up, one of which is killed by the neighbour, the other devoured by the dust bunny. As other assassins come after them, the neighbour takes on a protective role for Aurora, still sceptical of the existence of any dust bunny.
Dust Bunny was a directorial debut for Bryan Fuller. Fuller launched his career when he sold a script to Star Trek: Deep Space (1992-9) during its open pitch call and later became a producer and script editor on Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). Fuller went on to create several quirky and cultish genre shows such as Dead Like Me (2003-4), Wonderfalls (2004) and Pushing Daisies (2007-9), wrote the tv mini-series remake of Carrie (2002), served as an executive producer on Heroes (2006-10) and created/produced the tv series’ Hannibal (2013-5), American Gods (2017-21) and Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24). Prior to Dust Bunny, he had only directed two episodes of the documentary series Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror (2022).
Dust Bunny has a certain puzzling factor before you go into it. You don’t know what to make of the premise – “An eight-year-old girl asks her scheming neighbor for help in killing the monster under her bed that she thinks ate her family”. At face value, it sounds like it could be something akin to IF (2024) and its range of imaginary companions. Or just some weird children’s variant on a Monster Movie. Nothing however could compare you for how utterly strange the film actually is.
Dust Bunny manages one of the strangest tonal balancing acts I have come across. I am even stretching trying to fund adequate descriptions for comparison. It reminds me in tone of some of the wilful absurdism of Robert Rodriguez’s kids movies. The design scheme and deliberately heightened nonsense visuals reminds of the worlds in the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet – Delicatessen (1991), The City of Lost Children (1995) and Amelie (2001). But that is also not quite any of these in terms of likeness either. Maybe the nearest you could get is likening it to the relationship between Jean Reno’s hitman and young ward Natalie Portman from The Professional/Leon (1994), having been picked up and dropped into the world of Jeunet, along with a weird childhood whimsy/nightmare point-of-view.
The design scheme is bizarrely out of this world. The halls of the apartment are ornately coloured in florid ornamentation. Mads Mikkelsen’s visit to Sigourney Weaver in a restaurant comes with her seated behind a giant multi-coloured floral arrangement. Sophie Sloan discusses hiring Mads Mikkelsen as they sit across a table in his apartment with a lamp shaped like a chicken where the bulb is an egg it is in the process of laying.
As we keep watching, Dust Bunny gets increasingly stranger. Young Sophie Sloan follows neighbour Mads Mikkelsen out at night and watches from a rooftop as he battles and kills a Chinese New Year long dragon costume. Later she is seen having to navigate by rowing down the halls of the apartment on top of a bronze life-size figure of a hippo. Dialogue exchanges occur in a weirdly offbeat deadpan.
The plot wheels around the absurdity of the premise – Sophie Sloan claims to have conjured a dust bunny monster and then asks Mad Mikkelsen to eliminate it; he has a history as an assassin, who is also the target of rival assassins, but dismisses her claims as just being the people trying to kill him. There are some rather funny scenes when the ‘social worker’ comes to visit and Mads has to pretend to be Sophie’s parent. Everything comes together for the climactic convergence of hit persons on the apartment after both Mads and Sophie, where her claims are shown to be true.
The script for Dust Bunnyapparently started as one that was pitched to the Steven Spielberg produced tv series Amazing Stories (1985-7) but never ende d up going ahead. Fuller has spoken in interviews of wanting to return to a sense of fairytale-like innocence. You suspect at a certain point that the design scheme is the whole of the film with everything else fighting a tug of war with the assassin story and the childhood monster story, but the appeal of the oddness of the relationship between Sophie Sloan and Mads Mikkelsen and its found parent arc anchors the film.
(Nominee for Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here