Dust Bunny should have been one of the easiest slam dunks of this year’s TIFF lineup. It’s the directorial debut of legendary showrunner Bryan Fuller, he’s reteaming with Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen, and a creative concept that marries Leon: The Professional, Pan’s Labyrinth and even a hint of Tremors. And yet, even with the typically lively Midnight Madness crowd, I spent the entirety of Dust Bunny profoundly bored out of my skull.
The film follows ten-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan), a little girl living in terror of the monster under her bed, and warns her parents about not touching the floor so it won’t eat them. Her parents brush it off as her imagination, except it’s very much real. One night, she comes across her neighbour, a nameless hitman (Mads Mikkelsen) and follows him through Chinatown. The neighbour takes out an entire gang in the midst of a Chinese New Year parade but Aurora, only seeing the shadows, believes him to be a monster slayer and decides to hire him to kill the monster.
There are a few things I will give the film credit for. Sophie Sloan carries most of the movie on her shoulders, especially in the film’s nearly silent first act. She’s precocious yet resourceful, and she makes a solid first impression in her debut performance. Also, for the most part, Jeremy Reed’s production design is fantastic. The highly stylized sets have a storybook-like aesthetic to them that, while directly inspired by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, also feels reminiscent of Fuller’s incredibly underrated Pushing Daisies. The only exception to this would be the monster itself: a giant monstrous dust bunny who feels like a rough draft, both in design and the actual visual effects themselves.
As strong as the opening is, once Mikkelsen becomes more entangled into the mix, the cracks show quickly. The neighbour is convinced that Aurora is imagining this monster, and that she may just be a grieving child whose parents he may have killed in the past. It’s an idea that seems interesting on paper, but never properly develops on screen. It doesn’t help when a majority of their dynamic consists of Aurora yelling that the monster is real, and the neighbor saying “no it isn’t” over and over again. It gets repetitive real fast.
“I desperately wanted to love Dust Bunny. There is a world where this concept is executed brilliantly, but the movie we got now is just a mishmash of ideas that don’t mix well together at all. “
Mikkelsen is typically great at playing emotionally detached yet nuanced characters. But even when he does start to form a bond with Aurora, it just comes across as him just sleepwalking through the whole thing. Even worse is the world of assassins in which he inhabits isn’t any more interesting than him. How the film manages to make the more eccentric performances from Sigourney Weaver and David Dastmalchian feel boring baffles me to no end.
One of my biggest issues with the movie is it’s hard to figure out who the film is intended for. Although the film is seemingly a child-friendly entry point into horror, the bloodless kills feel both too brutal for kids, but also not brutal enough for older audiences. It’s already struggling to balance its wildly disparate tones, but by the time the film takes another hard swing into a big action set-piece in the third act, it was still too little, too late.
I desperately wanted to love Dust Bunny. There is a world where this concept is executed brilliantly, but the movie we got now is just a mishmash of ideas that don’t mix well together at all. Most of the humor falls flat, the action and horror elements lack any real bite, and the central dynamic between the two main characters lacks heart. I still have hope in Fuller’s potential as a filmmaker, but as it stands, I’m happier to leave this story on the shelf.
