(2025)
Written & Directed by Bryan Fuller
Starring Sophie Sloan, Mads Mikkelsen, Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, Sheila Atim, Rebecca Henderson, Line Kruse, Caspar Phillipson

There aren’t too many movies I feel that can perfectly blend in fantasy and reality together, with a heavy touch of surrealism, and maybe a little life lesson in there, and do it well. Tim Burton is one that comes to mind, and only after a few minutes of watching Dust Bunny, I wondered if he had anything to do with this picture! It really is like a child’s dream/nightmare come to life and seeing it through the eyes of a little 8-year-old girl.

Young Aurora watches in horror as her foster parents are devoured by the “monster that lives under my bed”. Except… is there really a monster that dwells there, eating anybody that walks on the floor? After witnessing her strange neighbor kill a giant dragon the other night, she figured he would be the perfect person to kill her monster. Granted, what she takes as a dragon is a bunch of Chinese hitmen, hiding in one of those dragon costumes we see during parades, but for Aurora, it was a real dragon. She tries to “hire” the man, only credited as “Intriguing Neighbor”, to kill this monster. Of course, he thinks it is all in her imagination. He believes that her parents might be dead, but thinks it might not have been a monster, but some other hit men out to get him, but went to the wrong apartment.

Mads Mikkelsen plays the neighbor and honestly, I wouldn’t have expected him to give this kind of performance and range in character that he shows here. But he gives the right amount of seriousness to his character but also showing that he still has feelings and is not a complete soulless killer. But the real star of the film is Sophie Sloan, who plays the little innocent Aurora. Sigourney Weaver plays Mikkelsen’s boss, which doesn’t take long for us to realize who the real villain in the picture is. David Dastmalchain shows up as another hired killer and once again takes a somewhat small role and makes it, and him, highly memorable.

This is his first feature film for writer / director Bryan Fuller, even though he’d been writing and directing for different episodic series for quite some time, such as Star Trek: Voyager, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and especially Hannibal, which he developed the series, and wrote 39 of the episodes. In Dust Bunny, he brings this world to life that is just stunning to watch unfold in front of you. There are plenty of times where we start to wonder if what we’re seeing is real, or just a tweak of surrealism that confuses us even more, because we start to believe it actually might be real! It’s not easy to blend those two together, but Fuller does an amazing job here.

The look of everything is incredible, from the wallpaper in the apartment, the look of the dumplings restaurant is bursting with colors, to even Aurora’s room. Production Designer Jeremy Reed has done a simply stunning job here, creating this world that almost shifts between reality and fantasy. Starting in the business doing music videos, he moved into features with Hard Candy (2005), then working with Oz Perkins on I Am Pretty Things that Live in the House (2016) and Gretal & Hansel (2020), and then more recently, They Will Kill You (2026).

The extras on this release are a little lacking, honestly, with only a few featurettes, but very short ones. We don’t even get any audio commentaries, which was quite disappointing, to maybe more on how they created this fantastical world. But the 4K print does look amazing and makes the look of this world we’ve been invited into even more astonishing.

I definitely wouldn’t call this a horror film, even though it does have its moments, the scariness is more akin to dark fantasy tales, or some of the nightmare images Tim Burton would give us. But the story of little Aurora and her neighbor, as well as the look of the film, is more than enough reason to seek this film out.