Dust Bunny

The Monsters We Keep

I used to think the space beneath my bed was a portal. If a foot dangled over the mattress, something would pull me into the dark. It is a universal childhood anxiety, but as we get older, the monsters usually change shape. They become bills, or illness, or men with angry voices. In Bryan Fuller's *Dust Bunny*, the monster is gloriously, unapologetically literal. Eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) claims a beast living under the floorboards ate her family. To navigate her own home, she builds a makeshift boat to avoid touching the wood. It's an absurd premise. (Or maybe it isn't, depending on how you view trauma). I'm not sure the tone always balances perfectly, but there's a strange comfort in watching a movie that commits so hard to its own weird logic.



Fuller has spent decades making television that looks like nobody else's. Shows like *Pushing Daisies* and *Hannibal* basically established their own visual languages, so it makes sense that his feature directorial debut is a maximalist feast. You can see the DNA of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's *The City of Lost Children* smeared all over the frame. The apartment building where Aurora lives feels less like a real place and more like a Gustav Klimt painting left out in the rain. Colors are aggressive. Every room is packed with visual noise. When Aurora decides to hire her neighbor, an assassin known only as 5B, to kill the beast, she marches up to him with absolute, exhausted certainty.

Let's talk about how the violence works here, because it's distinct. There is an early scene where Aurora watches 5B take out a band of hitmen. From her perspective, the gangsters' dragon kite morphs into an actual shadow dragon across the wall. The camera doesn't focus on the blood; it watches the shadows stretch and warp. The choreography is hyper-kinetic, feeling almost like shadow puppetry mixed with a Bruce Lee flick. You hear the thuds and snaps, but what you actually see is a child processing violence through a filter of fairytale magic. The edges are blurred. Which is a smart trick, considering how gruesome the actual narrative implications are.



Mads Mikkelsen plays 5B, and it's fascinating to watch what his body does in this film. He has been doing variations of the stoic, dangerous man for years. But here, stripped of the sleek sophistication he brought to his previous collaborations with Fuller, his shoulders are stiff. He moves with a rigid, methodical slowness, looking less like an apex predator and more like a very tired mechanic. When he interacts with Sloan, he doesn't soften his voice or crouch down to her level. He just stares at her, his sloping face registering a mix of annoyance and quiet recognition. Sloan, meanwhile, is a revelation. She carries herself with the heavy, slumped posture of someone who has been managing her own survival for way too long. Kids in movies are often written as precocious to a fault, but her gravity feels earned. Sigourney Weaver also shows up as 5B's handler, chewing the scenery with a lupine grin, clearly thrilled to be playing someone so straightforwardly mean.

Whether the film's R-rating works in its favor is up for debate. I kept thinking about who exactly this is for. It's too violent for actual kids, but its emotional vocabulary is entirely rooted in a child's perspective of safety and danger. The narrative can feel a bit thin, stretched out like taffy over its runtime. Some of the CGI looks a decade out of date. Still, that might be by design. As The Wrap pointed out in their festival review, "while you're welcome to interpret *Dust Bunny* as a troubled child's fantasy, it's just too much fun to buy little Aurora's story and embrace the monstrosity of it all." Sometimes the messy, obvious special effects actually serve the story better than polished photorealism would.



Ultimately, the movie is about the mechanics of coping. Fuller has spoken openly about his own difficult childhood, and you can feel that specific ache thrumming underneath the whimsical set design. Monsters are real. Sometimes they live under the floorboards, and sometimes they sit at the kitchen table. You don't defeat them by pretending they aren't there. You find someone who believes you, you gather your weapons, and you fight back. Even if your armor is just a makeshift boat and a very tired assassin.