After decades of inventing eccentric, visually lush television — from Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me to the much-mourned Hannibal — Bryan Fuller finally moves his singular voice onto the big screen. Fuller’s work has always balanced wonder and menace, twisting everyday longings into something uncanny. His feature debut, Dust Bunny, carries that blend forward, delivering equal parts charm and unease with a darkly playful edge.
The film opens in a worn New York City apartment building where eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) enlists the help of the taciturn assassin next door (Mads Mikkelsen, reuniting with Fuller) to eliminate a creature she insists lives beneath her bed. The hitman — credited only as “Intriguing Neighbor” — initially dismisses Aurora’s claims, preoccupied with threats tied to his line of work. What begins as a child’s quest quickly collides with the adult world’s dangers.
Image: Roadside AttractionsFuller thrives on that friction between the ordinary and the surreal, and Dust Bunny is no exception. From neon fireworks splashing across a grimy alley to an assassin melting into flowered wallpaper, Fuller’s visual imagination is unmistakable. Fans of his earlier work will recognize the same bold palettes and meticulous production design.
Food returns as one of Fuller’s signature motifs: dishes that are both beautiful and disquieting. In one scene, Aurora and the hitman share a rabbit-shaped dumpling whose seaweed eyes and tremor suggest something alive; in another, a sandwich briefly reads as ribbons of flesh from a different perspective. These fleeting, carefully staged moments lodge themselves in the memory — alluring and slightly nauseating.
Fuller has said his aim was to craft “a children’s movie that adults would enjoy watching with their kids.” That intent makes the film’s R rating feel incongruous; the film contains little explicit gore or profanity, and its sensibility aligns more with a Grimm-inspired fable than with outright horror. Dust Bunny operates like a dark fairy tale, where dread is suggested more than splattered.
Image: Roadside AttractionsCharacter names reinforce the story’s fable-like tone. Aurora borrows a classic fairy-tale name, and many adults in the film are reduced to descriptive epithets — Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man (David Dastmalchian) and Intimidating Woman (Rebecca Henderson), for example — so we experience them as archetypes filtered through a child’s imagination. That narrative distance heightens their menace while underscoring how children perceive adult threats as exaggerated and mysterious.
Though Fuller pares back the explicit carnage that marked some of his TV work, his appetite for unsettling twists remains intact. He transforms a prosaic annoyance — the dust bunny beneath a bed — into a charged source of dread, reminding viewers how fear can inflate the small and mundane into something monstrous.
The film’s most affecting surprise is the fragile rapport between Aurora and the assassin. Mikkelsen — known for playing chilling antagonists, including his Hannibal Lecter — offers a quieter, more guarded turn here. His character is blunt and dangerous but unexpectedly vulnerable around Aurora; their relationship oscillates between guardianship and mutual dependence, with the child often behaving more like the caretaker. It’s an uneasy, very human chemistry that lends the film both tenderness and disquiet.
Image: Roadside AttractionsDust Bunny may not indulge the full-throttle grotesquery of Fuller’s past projects — it’s decidedly more child-centric in tone — but it still resonates for outsiders of any age. The movie invites viewers to reclaim a small, frightened self and to see that many monsters exist mostly in the stories we tell about them. Visually bold and emotionally precise, Dust Bunny is a melancholy, fanciful horror fable that Fuller devotees will appreciate.
Dust Bunny opens in theaters on Dec. 12, 2025.
Source: Polygon
