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Style shines, story stumbles in Fuller’s bold debut
Anything but a clean film, Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny is uneven, indulgent and occasionally frustrating, but it also shows a director with a clear voice and resolve to push tone and genre in ways most studio films typically avoid.
Built around a simple hook, the film revolves around the hitman known as Resident 5B (Mads Mikkelsen) being hired by the eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) to kill the monster under her bed after it kills her parents.
Unlike Fuller’s more “out there” projects such as his Hannibal series, Dust Bunny’s premise is simple and stripped back enough that makes it tangible to go in several directions. Fuller chooses all of them.
Genre clash, visual punch
Horror, fantasy, dark comedy and emotional drama sit side-by-side in Dust Bunny, often in the same scene. When the different elements click, the film becomes striking, and when it does not, the film comes apart as easily as actual dust bunnies.
It is hard not to draw parallels to Fuller’s vision and execution of Hannibal, but that is certainly the case with how he approached Dust Bunny, his debut feature film. Like it, the film’s strongest element is its visual identity.
Fuller leans hard into stylisation with controlled lighting, heavy colours and artificial sets, resulting in a film that looks like a storybook filtered through a nightmare.
Audiences will get wide frames that feel composed rather than natural and sequences that prioritise mood over logic, just like how dreams tend to play out in deep sleep. It is a deliberate step away from realism and towards theatrical fantasy.
For the most part, it works in the film’s favour and at other times, Dust Bunny feels like it would have benefitted from a more personal touch – such as using animatronics – rather than its uneven computer-generated imagery (CGI).
Leads hold it together
Dust Bunny holds together better once it establishes the central relationship between Mikkelsen’s 5B and Sophie’s Aurora.
Rather than play a hitman that behaves as aloof as the visuals around him, the Danish leading man plays the role with restraint, neither over-explaining nor softening the character. Opposite him, Sophie carries the emotional core of the film, grounding the film when everything else drifts.
The dynamic somewhat holds the shape of the film, as without the performance of the duo, the film would easily collapse under its own ideas.
That said, the film has problems, right from its opening act that plunges its leads and the audience into Fuller’s vision, throwing tone, backstory and visual ideas at the viewer without first structuring itself.
The aforementioned blend of genres results in Dust Bunny being full of scenes that mix whimsy and violence, with several of them not always landing well and coming across like they belong in a different film.
Though it worked exceedingly well in Hannibal, Fuller’s emphasis on style over clarity harms Dust Bunny as the filmmaker’s prioritisation of how a scene looks often takes over how it reads, leading to striking and vivid imagery that fails to connect to the narrative.
Late focus finds shape
Though the film is very rough around the edges, particularly as it tries to find its footing in the first 30 minutes, it does improve as it goes on.
Once it locks into its central relationship and stops overloading itself, Fuller’s storytelling becomes more focused, with the later stretch becoming tighter, more emotional and closer to what the film seems to want to be from the start.
Dust Bunny works best when approached for its whimsical tone and Fuller’s intent with the film’s leads’ relationship, but this is not the film to go into expecting tight writing.
The film, ultimately, is an auteur-driven film built on visuals, mood and feeling that is reminiscent of Fuller’s earlier work, which means it has its trade-offs.
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