Not to second-guess writer-director Bryan Fuller, making his first foray into feature filmmaking, but I have to assume his Dust Bunny pitch was: children’s fantasy meets John Wick. While ostensibly high-concept, his film only has these two ideas and spends its entire runtime simply clanging them together. This isn’t a spoiler; there’s really nothing else to reveal.
The star of Dust Bunny is Aurora (Sophie Sloan, innocent), a young girl with doting foster parents, who also has a monster under her bed. Fair enough, as a child’s problems go, but after said monster eats her parents, she decides to hire Mads Mikkelsen (credited only as “intriguing neighbour”) to kill it. As a premise, this could have been a darkly fun film for kids, something worthwhile for them to absorb in its macabre glory. Instead, Fuller balances this fantastical notion against a more obviously violent narrative involving mysterious strangers (including Sigourney Weaver and David Dastmalchian) and guns. Since this blows it away from children, the film then morphs into something for more mature audiences, which only exposes how little there actually is for us. Setting aside whatever muddy philosophical points Fuller tries to make, his filmmaking is equally ugly and fake in effect. Some leeway to offer here: the geography of Aurora’s apartment need not be consistent, owing to the shifting whims of a child’s fantasy. Yet Fuller insists on a perspective and logic that his film cannot support.
If you want to see Mikkelsen engage in some action scenes, there are better films for that. If you wish for a twisted fairytale, something outside the norm, try somewhere else. Whatever itch you think Dust Bunny may scratch—via interesting monster designs perhaps or a bold, if misguided sense of newness—look elsewhere instead. This film’s central issue could be solved with a vacuum, which is saying something, because it already sucks.
