Dust Bunny Review: Bryan Fuller's Horror Thriller Starring Mads Mikkelsen Is More Adorable Than It Is Actually Good

Colored like the inside of a candy shop but plotted like Leon the Professional if it was directed by Amélie‘s Jean-Pierre Jeunet is Dust Bunny. A film that defies conventional genre boundaries as much as it’s certain to confuse the MPAA rating system between G and R, Bryan Fuller’s directorial debut is a cute but frequently befuddling affair plagued by middling humor.

The concept is fairly simple, at least at first. Aurora (Sophie Sloan), a 10-year-old orphan, is terrorized by a monster under her bed. Her parents (of course) do not believe her, but no matter: they are eaten pretty quickly. Aurora is not so much distraught by this development as perturbed by the monster’s incessant presence. Though the young, doe-eyed kid is fearless in so many other ways, she is (understandably) worried about being eaten herself. Until she meets her neighbor down the hall, Resident 5B (Mads Mikkelsen, whose character name is never disclosed).

5B is an eccentrically dressed, shaggy-haired hitman whose permanent state of grease and sweat paints him like a slobby John Wick. Following him one day, Aurora leaps from building to building in high pursuit until she spots him in the middle of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year, easily taking down a handful of mercenaries. But, because of the festivities and the sight of massive Chinese ornaments, it appears to Aurora from her perch that 5B is “slaying a dragon,” which convinces her to steal the alms from her church to hire him to kill her monster.

Dust Bunny Is Too Cute For Its Own Good

All in all, the humor is scattershot and uneven. Suffice it to say that Mikkelsen’s character is not exactly convinced the monster is real, and Fuller spends entirely too much time trying to mine humor out of his incredulity. There are several back-and-forths where he mispronounces the name Aurora, which seems to be merely a joke about Mikkelsen’s accent. Much of the dialogue is delivered in sardonic, diet-Wes Anderson-like flatness. A late-film shootout works comically, as the characters realize Aurora is not just precocious, but telling the truth about the monster’s presence. But there isn’t a ton here to justify the film’s overall twee attitude.

More confusing is the film’s palette. It’s an offensively garish film, with 5B’s sartorial decisions only one aspect of this strange world. The interior of Aurora’s apartment is forest green with wallpaper in excessive floral stencils. To move herself around the apartment without touching the floor (the dust bunny’s one rule, apparently), she resorts to pushing herself around with a purple, candy cane-like broomstick atop a copper pig. Every fight is blown out of proportion by flashing lights, almost like we’re suddenly in an anime.

The two bond despite their inability to understand one another, even as 5B’s employer (Sigourney Weaver) pressures him to eliminate Aurora for fear of what she knows about their murder-for-hire business. He never explicitly states an intention to walk away from his business, but it’s clear this new relationship is at least making him think differently about what he’s spent his life doing up to this point. Even as danger mounts, with hordes of assassins approaching, led by Damian Dastalmachian (who is sorely underused), Resident 5B is drawn more and more to his would-be adopted daughter.

The film works best as a heartwarming tale of a forced father-daughter relationship in which two wayward souls inadvertently find exactly the thing they’ve been missing. There’s a true joy to the film’s frankness; Aurora is readable as 10, but life has made her self-aware in ways that are perhaps unusual. She knows what she needs and is not afraid to ask for it.

Mikkelsen’s role is of a world-weary assassin whose moral compass is given a jolt when he believes Aurora’s parents have been mistakenly killed by other assassins who thought they were killing him, and so Fuller’s script nicely sets up this coming together. Mikkelsen is lovely, giving this troubled soul much more than is spoken aloud. So, too, is newcomer Sloan, who is truly adorable, sweet, and devastatingly funny.

Fans of Bryan Fuller’s television work (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, Star Trek: Discovery) will recognize his flair for the visually dramatic, but Dust Bunny doesn’t have those works’ expansive world-building, and what it does have in that direction owes too much to other intellectual properties. In the introduction to the Beyond Fest screening, Fuller mentioned Amblin films and the like of the 1980s that “f*cked me up,” like Gremlins. But Fuller’s work here inadvertently just feels like pastiche, right down to its plasticized sets.

Dust Bunny screened at the 2025 Beyond Fest.