I was so disappointed in writer / director Bryan Fuller’s “Dust Bunny,” a film that wants to be a lot of things (whimsical, terrifying, emotional, quirky, profound) but ultimately ends up being none of them. The movie serves up a crackerjack sense of style, but underneath the colorful visuals and the gory fairytale setup is a hollow, disjointed mess of a story.
The film tells the story of Aurora (Sophie Sloan), a young girl convinced that a monster under her bed is responsible for the death of her foster parents. Frightened and alone, she hires her hitman neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) to kill it. There’s so much twisted potential here to make a cult classic packed with horror-fantasy flavor, but it is almost totally squandered.
The opening third is almost completely without dialogue, leaning heavily on Sloan’s expressive performance (which is indeed a highlight). Mikkelsen does his usual brooding thing well, bringing a weary gravitas to the screen. Still, even his presence can’t help calm the spiraling tone or make sense of the increasingly unhinged, whirlwind direction.
The film is visually impressive in bursts, borrowing the symmetrical, vintage aesthetic of a Wes Anderson film and mixing it with surreal, gothic horror elements and slick direction. But rather than feeling inventive, it often plays like a video game on hallucinogens. Think dizzying camera angles, fast cuts, and gratuitous stylization that seem more like distractions than artistic choices. It’s as if the film is trying to hide the fact that it has very little to say.
The monster itself? It’s too cute to be terrifying. The metaphor the film tries to shoehorn in about inner demons and the monsters we carry with us lands with a thud. It’s surface level psychobabble that doesn’t earn any emotional impact.
There’s a macabre charm that some viewers might find charming, but it’s undercut by the lack of narrative coherence. The film starts off weird and gets weirder, but never in a way that feels purposeful. Instead of defying genre categorization, it simply feels unfocused and erratic. Fuller wants to be edgy and whimsical at the same time, but instead comes off as tonally confused.
A quirky idea buried under over-direction, under-writing, and faux profundity, I really tried to like “Dust Bunny,” but it’s just too weird, too messy, and too hollow to work.
By: Louisa Moore
Screen Zealots 