A girl who believes a monster hides under her floor hires her next-door neighbour, an assassin with a high bounty on his back, to kill it.
Colourful and crazy!
I mean, the logline itself is as intriguing as it gets. Imagine Jean-Pierre Jeunet directing a fantasy/horror through the eyes of a little girl. You’re getting close… Dust Bunny is drenched in the colourful whimsy of Amélie (2001), sprinkled with the eccentricity of Delicatessen (1991), and infused with subtle cyberpunk touches that make its world feel both recognisable and entirely alien. It is fantasy, horror, quirky comedy, fairy tale, and fever dream all rolled into one. And somehow… it works.
Making his theatrical directorial debut, writer/director Bryan Fuller juggles an astonishing variety of tones without ever dropping them. One moment, a child hides from a terrifying monster. The next, people are singing in church. Then follows a surreal, almost theatrical argument between a serial killer and a little girl, only to be topped moments later by an even stranger confrontation between the killer and his employer – the one and only Sigourney Weaver – bathed in lights that resemble halos over their heads before descending into beautifully choreographed absurdity. And if that wasn’t enough, an adult and a little girl casually dismember a body while swing music cheerfully plays in the background.
If you managed to read all that without taking a breath… Now you can. Dust Bunny feels less like a story and more like an experience. Expect exaggerated performances, extravagant hairstyles and makeup, delightfully eccentric dialogue, deadpan humour, impossible colours, elaborate production design, and characters who seem unaware that they inhabit a world with almost no recognisable logic whatsoever.
Yet that is precisely the point. Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sheila Atim, David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson, Sigourney Weaver, and the rest of the wonderful cast bring to life extravagant characters in a film where there are no obvious gimmicks. No shortcuts. No lazy narrative tricks. What initially appears to be incoherence gradually reveals itself as carefully orchestrated chaos, building towards a frenetic climax that somehow manages to make emotional and thematic sense.
Fuller and Dust Bunny invite you not to analyse every decision but simply to surrender to its imagination. And that is becoming increasingly rare. Would I recommend it? Absolutely. To whom? Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe one of the most difficult audiences to identify: those who love cinema that refuses to behave like anything else they’ve ever seen.
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