TIFF25: “Dust Bunny” is a Goofy, Monster-Killing Romp
This review was originally published on Film Obsessive.
Bryan Fuller has made a name for himself in the world of television. Hannibal was his longest running work while shows like Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls were canceled far too soon. While they all wildly differ in terms of concept, what unites all of Fuller’s work is their wonderfully weird approach to life and, more often than not, death. With the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival world-premiering, Dust Bunny, Fuller has leapt from the small screen to one of the biggest imaginable. In this jump, though, he didn’t lose any of his macabre, whimsical sincerity.
Aurora (Sophie Sloan), like most kids, is afraid of the monster under her bed. She hears grumbles, growls, and roars underneath her, but when her latest foster parents take a look for themselves, they just see harmless little dust bunnies. One night, Aurora trails the adventures of her mysterious neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen). She sees him slay a dragon and becomes convinced that he is the one who can kill the monster under her bed. The audience knows the dragon is actually a puppet with men holding it up, but Aurora is convinced otherwise. After her parents die by dust bunny attack, Aurora pleads with the neighbor, who begrudgingly agrees to help in any way he can.
The first fifteen minutes of Dust Bunny are primarily wordless. Isabella Summers’ score matches the delightfully weird, colorful overload of the visuals. As her score goes on, we watch The Neighbor leave in the dead of night in a tracksuit to kill some guys. We have no idea if they’re bad guys or if The Neighbor is the bad guy, we just get to be swept up in the rain soaked streets of some nameless city with bright, flickering neon signs. Summers’ score is as imaginative as Fuller’s visuals. There are clear John Wick influences in The Neighbor’s dryness and his ability to easily defeat adversaries that have him outnumbered, but that’s not really the focus of this film. There are three larger scale fight scenes, but none that are enticing enough to make you wish there were more.
courtesy of TIFF
The undeniable charm of Dust Bunny comes from the dynamic between The Neighbor and Aurora. They are your typical odd couple, one gruff and unrelentingly closed off while the other lonely yet goofy, still inherently childlike despite all of the loss in her life. By hiring The Neighbor, Aurora inadvertently puts herself on the radar of The Neighbor’s hitman boss (a delightfully unhinged Sigourny Weaver). She puts out a hit on Aurora because she has seen The Neighbor’s face. It forces the two to become an unlikely duo because while The Neighbor is a hitman, he’s not going to let a kid get killed.
As one might imagine, the monster under the bed is more than a vicious, parent-eating dust bunny. The monster is the parts of ourselves we think are broken that haunt us, they push people we want to love away from us. It’s hard to recognize in the depth of heartache and depression that it’s not the monster that pushes others away, but our own efforts to conceal the monster that does that for us. Dust Bunny is not about taming the monster or locking it away, but living with it. We all have parts about ourselves that hurt, they cause us and others pain, but it’s about how we manage the proverbial monsters under our bed that speaks to who we are as people. Like Aurora, The Neighbor has monsters of his own and it’s through helping her that he realizes that he too has been trying to run instead of facing what follows him around.
Dust Bunny is Fuller fulfilling some of his most imaginative whims. The setting for the film is primarily the apartment complex that has the look of Versailles if the famed Parisian compound was kicked up a pastel notch. Each room of Aurora’s apartment is a different color with an assaulting-on-the-eyes wallpaper and she moves from room to room atop a bronze hippo because the floor is where the monster will get you. Dust Bunny is meant to entertain as much as it’s meant to frighten. Where snappy dialogue provides as much of a thrill as every creak of the floorboards. The first, but hopefully not the last time we see Bryan Fuller’s strange ideas on the big screen.
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