WHAT IT IS ABOUT
Dust Bunny is a dark fairy-tale bedtime monster story about a young girl named Aurora who is convinced that a monster lives under her bed and believes it has already killed her family. No adult takes her seriously, so she takes matters into her own hands by hiring her next-door neighbor, a hitman played by Mads Mikkelsen, to take care of the beast.
He does not believe her at first and assumes the threat is more practical, assassins looking for him. As he starts to suspect he might be connected to what happened to Aurora’s parents, he stays close to her, and they form a relationship that recalls Léon: The Professional.
Despite its fairy-tale premise, this is not a children’s movie. It is rated R and leans into creature imagery, stylized shootouts, and heightened violence. Visually, it can feel like a live-action companion to Laika’s stop-motion worlds, using fantastical imagery to explore trauma from a child’s point of view.
WHERE IT COMES FROM
Conceived first as a possible episode idea for Apple TV+’s revival of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories that never moved forward, Dust Bunny has Bryan Fuller turning a stranded TV concept into his debut feature. The American writer and producer is best known for the operatic horror of Hannibal, but his television work often blends whimsy with darkness. Missing how the 1980s made room for films that could be accessible to younger audiences while still giving them something to fear at bedtime, like Gremlins, Poltergeist, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dust Bunny is his attempt to modernize that lost subgenre. The irony is that, in chasing that throwback appeal, the film still ended up with an R rating, before landing in TIFF 2025’s Midnight Madness slot and arriving in theatres later in 2025 with comparatively little fanfare.
HOW IT WORKS ON SCREEN
As noble as Fuller’s intentions are, and as full of promise the concept is, Dust Bunny does not quite click in the way you want it to. Its stylistic choices and character relationships feel strangely weightless and distant. Like its sets and visual effects, the film comes packed with good ideas, but it rarely immerses or feels real.
In many ways, the film is a natural progression of Bryan Fuller’s career, drawing on the visual whimsy of Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, while circling back to Hannibal-adjacent ideas about humanizing monsters. On paper, that combination should be exciting, rich with opportunities for emotional connection and memorable visuals. In practice, Fuller does not nail the cinematic feel, and the result drifts closer to last year’s Sketch at TIFF, a film brimming with clever ideas that needed more polishing and the steadier hand of a more assured director.
The colors and exaggerated props push the film into a fantastical world, but it leans so heavily into that approach that the artificiality becomes a problem. At no point do we forget we are looking at a constructed set, not far from a high-end shopping mall recreation, and it often feels like the characters could walk off it at any moment. That weightlessness is felt in an early action set piece with Mikkelsen, in the score, which sounds overly synthetic, and in the monsters themselves, whose stop-motion textures and movements are often distracting.
Narratively, the film is also oddly fragmented. The first act is confusing and does a poor job of establishing the characters. It is not clear, for example, what Aurora thinks she saw regarding her parents, or what the film wants us to believe, until the story eventually has to re-explain its own setup through dialogue. After that, Dust Bunny meanders, introducing new characters and set pieces that do not always feel like they are building toward a cohesive conclusion.
To its credit, Fuller is efficient with his cast. The supporting actors are game and lock into the movie’s unusual tone, and young Sophie Sloan, in particular, is terrific. She brings intelligence and vulnerability well beyond her years, and her throughline stays engaging even when the film around her gets blurry. Sigourney Weaver is also a delight, especially once she enters the action and the movie finally loosens up.
The weak link, surprisingly, is Mads Mikkelsen. On paper, he seems perfect as the hitman neighbor, but he never quite finds the balance between cold detachment and subtle empathy that Jean Reno brought to Léon: The Professional. Too often, Mikkelsen reads as genuinely irritated by Aurora, not as someone who would give her a moment of attention. And while he can be magnetic in grounded material, he has rarely been convincing in effects-driven projects, and Dust Bunny does not change that.
Even when it contributes to the film’s distance, the production design is imaginative, and the movie finds flashes of humor in its odd prop details, like a chicken with a lamp in an unlikely place. There are also a few touches that oddly recall Robert Rodriguez films, including the creative use of a shoe heel as an all-purpose tool.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It is a shame that Dust Bunny ended up with an R rating, because movies that provide genuine frights for a younger crowd have become so rare. Many viewers will instead turn to the very colorful Zootopia sequel at the cinema. But despite the best intentions and the strong ideas, it is a film that ultimately frustrates. The premise is simply too good, and even with muddled execution, it still manages to warm the heart, mostly thanks to Sloan’s performance. Its faults turn it into “fine” at best, when it had everything it needed to be great.
This is part of Reviews On Reels TIFF 2025 Coverage.
Still courtesy of TIFF.