As demonstrated by his cult TV hits Pushing Daisies and Hannibal, Bryan Fuller isn’t one to play it safe
With Dust Bunny—his feature directorial debut, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in its Midnight Madness program—he goes way out on a limb, crafting a genre-bending fairy tale about things that go bump in the night.
Heavily indebted to the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Luc Besson (among others), Fuller’s wacko film concerns a young girl who, convinced that there’s a monster under her bed, hires her next-door neighbor, a hitman, to take care of it before it swallows her whole. Blending horror and humor, sweetness and scares, and fantasy and family melodrama, it shoots for the moon—and, more often than not, scores a bullseye.
Through an open window that looks out onto an imaginary New York City, a speck of dust floats into the bedroom of Aurora (Sophie Sloan), gliding past toys and stuffed animals, through dollhouses, and over drawings. Knocking into and combining with additional globs of dust, it swells in size and, then, takes the shape of a small bunny.
In the bed above this creature, Aurora is downright petrified, and for good reason, since the rabbit suddenly knocks the bottom of her mattress, eliciting a scream from the girl that brings her parents to the door. Unsurprisingly, they don’t believe her claims that something malevolent has joined her in the dark, nor do they take seriously her warning not to touch the floor because, should they do so, “He’ll eat you.”
Regardless of their skepticism, Aurora takes no chances and relocates to the fire escape, where fireflies dance around her head. Before she falls asleep, she notices her neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) walking below, and the following day, another firefly draws her attention to the man’s mailbox.
The universe, it seems, is trying to tap her on the shoulder, and that evening, she spots him making the same trek and opts to covertly tail him to Chinatown, where fireworks and neon signs light up the sky, and a giant dragon puppet manipulated by a team of men slinks through the busy streets. In an alleyway, Mikkelsen’s enigmatic loner strikes, attacking these individuals, and from the rooftop above, it looks to Aurora like he’s felling a mythological beast.
Dust Bunny’s opening is wildly hyper-stylized, all meticulous production design (such as the old-fashioned gold elevator in Aurora’s building), highly choreographed action, and twisting, tumbling, vertiginous camerawork. Fuller doesn’t hold his audience’s hand, expecting them to keep up as his story barrels forward, and it takes a turn for the macabre when Aurora’s parents, failing to avoid the floor, are hungrily devoured by a beastly rabbit while the girl hides under her blanket.
The following morning, her mother and father are nowhere to be found, and after struggling to survive on her own, she gets an inspired idea. To make it a reality, though, she first attends church where, decked out in old-lady glasses and a scarf tied around her head, she steals the collection plate. With that $327.42 of pilfered loot and an accompanying handwritten note, she propositions her neighbor to kill the creature under her bed.
Aurora and the unnamed, enigmatic gentleman discuss this offer at a table decorated with a chicken lamp whose bulb is in the animal’s anus—one of countless bizarre flourishes that turn Dust Bunny into an unreal dreamscape.
Mikkelsen’s recluse is a hired gun, and he assumes that Aurora’s mom and dad were slain by assassins who were after him but visited the wrong apartment. The thing is, Aurora’s parents were actually foster parents, and she claims that her biological and original foster parents were also gobbled up by the ferocious bunny.
Regardless, the neighbor feels responsible for the mayhem that’s taken place across the hall in Aurora’s residence, and that puts him at odds with his handler Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), who notifies him that he’s wanted by “everyone” and that, because Aurora has seen his face, she’s now a liability and must be eliminated.
Hitmen in wallpaper camouflage, a child welfare services agent (Sheila Atim) with ulterior motives, and a rival killer (David Dastmalchian) in a weird black suit all soon reveal themselves as players in what turns out to be a deadly game of hunt or be hunted, with a hopping-mad goliath intent on consuming anyone who dares violate the rules.
Childhood neglect, abuse, and abandonment lurk beneath the film’s surface, although Fuller eschews modern horror’s habit of directly positing his ghastliness as a manifestation of grief. Rather, he’s after something more whimsically demented, not to mention unexpectedly touching.
Dust Bunny is, in many respects, a hybrid of The City of Lost Children and Léon: The Professional. Yet despite those ’90s gems’ influence on the proceedings, the mayhem on display has its own unique disposition, in part because Mikkelsen so humorously balances intimidating badass stoicism with goofy drollness.
Better still, the acclaimed actor has a movingly prickly rapport with Sloane, whose character’s unflappable self-possession is as funny as her mockery of Mikkelsen’s pronunciation of her name.
The two are a charmingly cartoony pair, and Fuller’s R-rated instincts result in a handful of inspired scenes, the loopiest of which finds the neighbor showing Aurora how to drain and chop up a corpse for disposal, and allowing her to help with the final packing-the-dismembered-parts phase of the operation. Weaver’s Laverne doesn’t have much to do before the finale, in which she sports high heels that double as revolvers. But her off-kilter performance, full of bonkers smiles and behavior, such as stretching her jaw in unnerving fashion, contributes to the comically terrifying atmosphere.
Dust Bunny climaxes with Aurora and her neighbor fending off multiple sets of adversaries while attempting to avoid becoming chow for the bunny, whose enormous teeth are the stuff of nightmares.
Despite its carnivalesque insanity, however, the film manages to conclude on a heartwarming note, contending that sometimes, the monsters we fear are in fact the ones we’ve summoned ourselves, and can be left behind when they’re no longer needed. Balancing the sinister and the saccharine to the end, Fuller proves that he remains as audacious, and unpredictable, as ever.
