When the 4K UHD disc of Dust Bunny landed on my desk, I have to admit I’d never heard of it. I didn’t do much research into it before I stuck it in and pressed play, preferring to come to the film as blind as possible. I either missed the directorial credits at the beginning of the film or they didn’t exist, for it wasn’t until the closing credits that I realized it was directed by Bryan Fuller. When I saw his name, I turned to my wife and said, “That makes sense.”
Buy Dust Bunny from MovieZyngFuller is the beloved creator of such TV shows as Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal, all known for their creative visuals, quirky characters (well, I don’t know that Hannibal’s characters are so much quirky as strange), and their fascination with death. Dust Bunnies absolutely fits within that mode.
I kind of hated it for the first few minutes. It begins in an average-looking child’s room. The window is open with a breeze blowing the curtains slightly. A blob of dust flies in. (Who keeps their windows open these days without screens? Don’t these people have bugs?) The camera follows the blob as it zips across the room this way and that (paying absolutely no attention to how the wind would blow it, or how physics works). It picks up bits of more dust as it is blown under the bed, where it forms the shape of a bunny (ah, the film is called Dust Bunny, that’s cute). This is all done with computer graphics, giving it all a slightly off look.
The camera moves upward, and we see Aurora (Sophie Sloan) lying in her bed, scared to death. She screams. Her parents run in and comfort her. There is a monster under her bed, she tells them. They smile and say monsters aren’t real.
On another night, she’ll spy a strange man skulking up the stairs (he’s never given a name, is called “Intruding Neighbor” in the credits, and is played by Mads Mikkelsen). He lives just across the hallway. The following night she will follow him down the stairs, down the street, all the way to Chinatown. There, she’ll see him get into a fight with a dragon, slaying it.
That night the monster under her bed will return. Like all kids, she instinctively knows that monsters cannot get her if she doesn’t touch the floor. She climbs on furniture, scoots around on a big toy hippo, and stays on her bed as often as possible. But her parents aren’t so wise, and they are eaten by the monster.
She swipes some money from a church donation tray, writes a note to her neighbor, and asks him to kill the monster. Since she saw him slay that dragon, she knows he’s the man for the job. The dragon, of course, was a Chinese dragon, and the man did not so much slay it as kill the men inside. He is some kind of hitman or enforcer. He figures her parents were probably just taken out by people looking to kill him.
When he learns that her parents were actually foster parents and that her previous foster parents and her real parents were also killed or disappeared, he figures something else must be up. Despite his handler (a delightful Sigourney Weaver) telling him to kill the girl because she’s seen his face, he decides to take the girl’s money and the job she’s offering. He doesn’t really believe in monsters, but he knows all about bad men.
The relationship between Aurora and the man is lovely. Sophie Sloan is just the right amount of precocious, cute, and brave, and Mads Mikkelsen is…well…he’s Mads freaking Mikkelsen, which is to say awesome. They have some delightful back and forth, and the way his hitman handles this goofy little kid who believes in monsters is endearing.
There is a lot of action, and it is well handled. Fuller relies a little too heavily on computer graphics, giving it all a slightly off-kilter look that annoyed me. Those kinds of graphics are kind of his thing, as he employed them in all his shows, but those were all super stylized, and it fit them better than it does this film.
It tries just a little too hard to be cutesy and quirky. Again, his television series are all like that (well, I wouldn’t call Hannibal cutesy, but it’s definitely weird). Again, that works for the TV, but not so much here. Well, it works quite a bit here, but sometimes it is just a little too much for my tastes.
It did take me a bit to warm up to it. I had to get on its wavelength, and that took some time. It didn’t help that the film is very dark. The cinematography looks good, but man, they could have turned the lights up a bit. Admittedly, I watched the film in the middle of the afternoon, and my curtains are fully blackout, but still I had a hard time seeing what was going on some of the time. But once I got into it, I had a lot of fun watching it.
I’ll definitely be watching it again, and I suspect knowing what happens, and that this is a Bryan Fuller film, I’ll be able to get into it from the beginning and enjoy it a lot more. Still, even now this is a thoroughly enjoyable film. Not enough to make me want Fuller to stay in film and never make another TV series, but maybe enough to make me look forward to his next film (after he gives us Season 4 of Hannibal, damn it).
There is no Blu-ray included, but there is a digital code.
Buy Dust Bunny from AmazonExtras include the following:
- Making Dust Bunny: a brief EPK with cast and crew comments about the making of the film.
- Monster Craft: A short trailer for the film.
- Q&A Sizzle: with Mads Mikkelsen and Bryan Fuller answering questions
- Cute to Cutthroat: Cast members talk about the monster
- Mads Choreography Video: A fun split screen with Mads demonstrating an action sequence with some dolls
- Cast Explainers: More comments from the cast.
- Theatrical Trailer
If you are a fan of Bryan Fuller’s television work, then I suspect you’ll enjoy Dust Bunny. It is very much on par with those works. It is a fun, weird film with some excellent performances from the two leads. Well worth checking out.
