1 of 5 | Sophie Sloan and Mads Mikkelsen star in “Dust Bunny,” in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 9 (UPI) — On television, Bryan Fuller brought surreal wonder to whimsical original series like Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies, and adaptations like Hannibal and American Gods. Dust Bunny, in theaters Friday, shows Fuller at his full fantastical powers.
Aurora (Sophie Sloan) lives in an apartment with her parents. She follows her neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) into the city and watches him battle assassins and a dragon in an alley.
She then sees a ball of dust under her bed form an actual monstrous rabbit, which she believes she hears eat her parents in the next room. So she hires her neighbor to help her kill the dust bunny.
Taking Aurora’s point of view, the film respects that whether she imagines the bunny or really saw it, it’s real to her. Adults rationalize other possible explanations for the disappearance of her parents, but the film never discredits her.
The neighbor definitely is a hired killer. She did witness him on the job and incur the professional interest of both his allies and enemies by involving him.
The aesthetic of Dust Bunny harkens back to other fantasy filmmakers, just like director Barry Sonnenfeld infused Pushing Daisies with his off-kilter whimsy. The first act of Dust Bunny feels like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, silently following Aurora looking over her fire escape, through mail slots and into the streets and alleys.
Everything seems a little too big from Aurora’s angle. Lenses elongate mundane locations like her apartment hallways.
Fuller’s TV shows were already more cinematic than their contemporaries, especially the gory art pieces of Hannibal. In the movie, he’s playing with the entire cinematic frame, and chooses an even wider picture than the standard widest widescreen.
Dust Bunny is scary but still okay for kids, akin to ’80s family entertainment like Gremlins, Poltergeist and The Dark Crystal.
Aurora tries not to touch the floor, a very common game for kids. Here she doesn’t fear the floor is lava, but that the dust bunny is waiting to emerge.
When the bunny is seen, the creature is fairly standard modern CGI, but the ominous foreshadowing is effective. Floorboards and tiles rise over its movements, and those look tangible even if they are also computer effects.
When the neighbor leaps to Aurora’s defense, there are bursts of action that hold up with John Wick. Dust Bunny shares producers Basil Iwanywik and Erica Lee with that franchise.
Mikkelsen defies gravity but doesn’t quite fly. He faces flamboyant foes. All of their confrontations follow causal actions and retaliations, and are clearly photographed.
The dust bunny is obviously a metaphor for Aurora making sense of losing her parents, but a movie can literally realize a carnivorous dust bunny. The fantasy is empowering for kids facing their own grief, and endearing for grown-up caretakers, even loners like the neighbor.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.