‘Dust Bunny’ review: Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver team up for gnarly fairy tale

Bryan Fuller has carved his career out of blending whimsy with the macabre.

In 2003, he offered Dead Like Me, a sensationally funny and heart-wrenching tale of a young adult whose untimely death turns her into a hapless grim reaper. Four years later, he charmed us again with Pushing Daisies, a murder-mystery show centered around the romance between a pie maker who can resurrect the dead and the girl-next-door he’s risen, but can never touch (lest she die again). From there, he went into darker adaptations, like TV’s Hannibal and American Gods.

Now, he’s offering a fairytale in Dust Bunny, so you better believe it’s winsome and deeply fucked up.

From the logline, Dust Bunny intrigues: A young girl hires a hitman to kill the monster under her bed. But what instantly takes this from promising to must-see is the casting, with Mads Mikkelsen as the hitman.

Yes! Dust Bunny reunites Hannibal‘s creator and eponymous killer for a twisted tale of terror and tenderness. While fitting in solidly with what we’ve come to expect from Fuller’s sensibilities, Dust Bunny feels like what might happen if Léon: The Professional had a baby with Amélie and Tremors. Don’t think too hard on how that would work. Focus on this — this movie rocks.

Dust Bunny has a sweet yet rotten sensibility.

Written and directed by Fuller, Dust Bunny seems to pull from the French romantic sensibilities of Luc Besson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Like Besson’s Léon, Dust Bunny‘s plot follows an orphaned little girl who calls upon the hitman down the hall of her cruddy apartment building to save her from a vicious monster. Like Jeunet’s Amélie, Dust Bunny offers a color palette and magical realism reminiscent of a charming postcard, weathered by neglect.

Young Aurora (Sophie Sloan) lives in a world festooned with patterns so ornate and intrusive that they border on suffocating. Practically every wall and piece of furniture piece is laced with curlicues, flowers, or stripes. Aurora’s bedroom is swathed in pinks and greens, but less cheerful and more the shades of putrid Pepto-Bismol and a smoky night sky.

The wider metropolis — where she stalks “the intriguing neighbor” (Mikkelsen) that she suspects can help her — is colored in deep crimson, teal, and mustard, less vibrant and more caked with shadow and dust. Every resident in this murky metropolis has an affinity for bold prints, including a gang dressed as if they are all currently modeling Thom Browne’s latest line of plaid kilt suits.

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Everything around Aurora exudes beauty and decay. So when her parents are gobbled up by the monstrous dust bunny that lurks under her bedroom floors, much like the shark does the waters of Amity Island in Jaws, she looks for hope in the one man who seems invincible to the ravenous rot.

Demanding his help, she sits before him with whatever money she can gather (how she does so is an irreverent treat too good to spoil). But he insists monsters are not real, hence it was not a monster that killed her parents.

A battle of wills and perspectives ensues, as the unnamed neighbor takes this curious situation back to his femme fatale handler (Sigourney Weaver), who believes Aurora’s parents have been axed by another assassin. However, if you’ve ever gotten sucked into one of Fuller’s fantasy worlds, where outrageous twists, earnest heart, and dark jokes bloom together, you might well guess the truth is complicated.

Dust Bunny is surprising, gnarly, and genuinely scary.

Fuller has created a fairy tale that starts off feeling like it could be for kids, but steadily grows into something too mature and deliciously unhinged for them. The first act leans away from dialogue, allowing the visuals and the performances of Sloan and Mikkelsen to communicate curiosity and connection before they even meet. A battle scene, where Aurora spies the neighbor’s special set of skills, offers whiz-bang action, brought to life with inventive fight choreography, shadow puppetry, and a tinny, greenscreened world that recalls once-groundbreaking actioners like Sin City and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Admittedly, such obvious CGI is frowned upon nowadays. But Dust Bunny‘s use of the technology fits the film’s general aesthetic of a world made up of the unbelievable, the beguiling, and the marred. Basically, these less than photorealistic effects invite us to abandon reality and embrace Aurora’s world, encouraging us to believe in the monster under her bed. And what a monster!

The character design of this creature is unique and disturbing. Made up of fluff, teeth, and bulk, the titular beast is a thrill to witness as it rises from under the floorboards. The sound design enhances this scare, the cracking of the boards giving a sense of might even when the dust bunny is unseen. At first, his kills are offscreen. But as Dust Bunny builds the bond between girl and hitman, the stakes rise, as does the violence onscreen. Baddies will be gobbled up with clear relish from Fuller, who makes the demise of a stylish fleet of killers into mounting punchlines.

Mads Mikkelsen is pitch-perfect as a little girl’s hitman bestie.

A premise this dark might urge some filmmakers to balance with a goofy or even kind-eyed male lead. (Think Jean Reno in The Professional, who had a soft-hearted love of movies and potted plants.) Bless Fuller for rejecting both.

Mikkelsen plays the role of this hitman seriously, mostly stoically. It makes sense for a man whose profession and life demand that he stay cool under pressure. And why it works so splendidly here is that Aurora is similarly stern. Watching a grown man and a pigtailed little girl glare at each other from across a table, a chicken-shaped lamp perched between them, is the kind of classic comedy that dates back to Charlie Chaplin and The Kid.

Sloan and Mikkelsen work as a duo because they operate on the same wavelength: life or death, no kids’ stuff. Fuller brings some more lively and outlandish figures to life around them, like Weaver, who has killer fashion sense and a deliciously mean directness, whether discussing could-be hits or child-rearing. David Dastmalchian is a standout as a sensitive goon who can squeal like an alarm bell. Rebecca Henderson brings cool snarls as another foe, while Sheila Atim (The Woman King) plays a social service worker so precise and quirky that it seems she strolled over in her perfectly fitted, patterned suit from Pushing Daisies.

Truly, those still aching over that show’s abrupt cancellation might find solace in the tone and humor here.

Dust Bunny is exactly the kind of movie fans should expect from Fuller, but it’s also wildly surprising. As soon as it ended, I wanted to watch it again — not just for the fun of it, but to assure myself it was real and not some strange dream sparked from too much sour candy.

Dust Bunny was reviewed out of its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.