TL;DR: Dust Bunny is a visually uneven, narratively scattered dark fantasy that squanders its killer premise but survives on charm, cast chemistry, and fleeting sparks of Bryan Fuller magic. Great ideas, great actors, not-so-great execution.
Dust Bunny
I walked into Dust Bunny with the kind of optimism usually reserved for surprise Nintendo Directs and unexpected Season 2 renewals. Bryan Fuller, the man who turned murder into visual poetry with Hannibal and made death feel whimsically bureaucratic in Dead Like Me, was finally stepping into the big-screen arena. Fuller doing a feature film felt like a cheat code for genre fans. This was supposed to be the moment when all his signature obsessions—baroque color palettes, macabre fairytale logic, casually gorgeous gore—collided into something unforgettable.
But Dust Bunny is a strange beast. It has the bones of a future cult classic, the cast of a prestige thriller, and the premise of a dark fantasy gem. And yet, somewhere between its digital dreamscapes and its sputtering screenplay, the movie never evolves beyond an intriguing draft of something far more potent. As I sat there during my screening, I kept thinking of those childhood moments when I’d lift the couch cushions expecting treasure and instead find an old USB cable, some lint, and a Lego that absolutely should not be stepped on barefoot. Dust Bunny promises riches but delivers clutter.
The film’s central hook should be irresistible: Aurora, played with genuinely magnetic intensity by Sophie Sloan, is a kid whose imagination is both her coping mechanism and her worst enemy. She believes a monster murdered her parents. Under her floorboards. In the house she still lives in. It’s the kind of elevator pitch that practically begs for Guillermo del Toro-level atmosphere. And then in walks her neighbor—Mads Mikkelsen—playing a soft-spoken, John Wick-coded assassin whom Aurora tries to hire like a tiny entrepreneur of vengeance.
This should be the setup for a spectacularly twisted buddy horror. Instead, Dust Bunny keeps tripping over its own tone.
Why Dust Bunny Never Commits to Its Own Darkness
One of the biggest issues I had with Dust Bunny is how quickly it reveals its hand. A great dark fantasy thrives on ambiguity. Think Pan’s Labyrinth, where every shadow could be real magic or trauma wearing a prettier mask. Dust Bunny immediately decides it doesn’t want to play that game. It answers its supernatural mystery outright, as if afraid viewers will lose patience.
But once that question is resolved, the screenplay keeps circling back to it anyway, like a browser tab that refuses to close. Characters repeatedly ask what Aurora truly saw. Scenes build up tension only to undercut themselves with quirky side conversations that would have landed better if the script weren’t already juggling a dozen half-built ideas.
As the story expands into assassin mythology and creature lore, it begins feeling like the pilot for a potentially brilliant TV series rather than a cohesive movie. That’s where Fuller’s instincts betray him. He’s a world-builder who thrives on episodes, arcs, slow-burn revelations. Compressed into a feature film runtime, Dust Bunny becomes scattershot, rushing through plot threads instead of weaving them.
Still, the performances anchor the chaos. Sloan and Mikkelsen share the kind of unexpected chemistry that makes you wish the entire film had locked into their dynamic earlier. Mikkelsen, whose face was carved by Nordic gods specifically so he could play emotionally exhausted killers, slips into Resident 5B like a well-fitted leather glove. Watching him in a quasi-Léon mentor role is undeniably fun, even if the movie never fully figures out what to do with that energy.
And yes, Sigourney Weaver uses guns hidden in her shoes. It’s objectively delightful, the kind of weirdness that makes you wonder if Dust Bunny would have worked better if Fuller had leaned entirely into the absurd instead of tiptoeing between tones.
When Fuller’s Visual Style Goes… Flat?
If you’ve watched even two minutes of Pushing Daisies or Hannibal, you know Fuller’s imagery is usually lethal in the best possible way. He makes food look sinful, blood look operatic, and wallpaper look like a mood. That’s why Dust Bunny’s visual execution surprised me—and not in the good way.
The movie mixes practical sets with CGI-heavy backdrops, and the seams show. Not in a purposeful, storybook-artifice way. More in a mid-budget streaming movie way. I kept squinting at backgrounds like they were green-screen Zoom calls. Fuller’s trademark tactile fantasy gets sanded down by an over-reliance on digital environments, and the world loses the handmade charm that makes his other works so hypnotic.
Entire transitions are rendered digitally. Entire shots appear synthetic. At times it feels like Dust Bunny is cosplaying as a video game cutscene. And listen, I love a good cutscene. I have spent an embarrassing number of hours rewatching Final Fantasy CG cinematics. But when your movie stars Mads Mikkelsen—one of the most expressive physical actors alive—maybe don’t replace him with a plastic CG double mid-fight sequence.
This brings me to the action. Dust Bunny wants Wick-level choreography without committing to Wick-level stunt work. The editing gets choppy. Movement looks weightless. A mid-air leap by a CGI Mikkelsen elicited an audible “oh noooo” from the audience at my showing.
What Fuller attempted was bold, and parts of it occasionally dazzle, but the film too often feels like a draft of the visual spectacle it wants to be. The result is a movie that’s conceptually vibrant but visually inconsistent, a frustrating combination for a director known for making murder scenes look like perfume ads.
The Bright Spots That Hint at the Movie Dust Bunny Could Have Been
Before I sound too doom-and-gloom, let me say this: Dust Bunny does have flashes of the brilliance Fuller fans crave. Aurora’s room is a work of art—cluttered, imaginative, full of texture. Resident 5B’s kitchen feels like a noir postcard. The assassin-network restaurants are so stylish they practically beg for an accompanying art book.
And the emotional core, when the film lets itself be intimate, works. There’s genuine heart in the relationship between Aurora and 5B. There’s tragedy in the film’s themes of guilt, grief, and delusion. There’s even genuine humor, often in the form of weird little idiosyncrasies Fuller sneaks into character interactions.
That’s what makes Dust Bunny difficult for me to dismiss entirely. It’s flawed, messy, and visually compromised, but it’s also trying to say something. It has ambition. It has personality. It just needed another script pass, a firmer grip on tone, and a few fewer CGI shortcuts.
Instead, it fumbles its horror potential and ends up feeling like a prototype for a film I would absolutely love in its final version.
