Dust Bunny (2025): Macabre whimsy with a touch of childhood fears
2025 • Bryan Fuller • 3.00:1 • Jump to Gallery ↓
Bryan Fuller‘s directorial debut, Dust Bunny, tells the story of a delightfully hard-boiled eight-year-old girl who is convinced that a monster living beneath her floorboards has eaten her family. In order to eradicate the creature, she robs a church collection plate to hire her reclusive neighbour: a weary, mysterious hitman with a violent past. Suspecting that Aurora’s parents were actually victims of assassins targeting him, the guilt-ridden killer reluctantly accepts the job.
This eccentric, candy-coloured, gothic fairy tale explores the gap between childhood imagination and the grim reality of violence. It’s like a Roald Dahl story filtered through the vision of a creator with a distinctive aesthetic. The main set is an apartment building with rounded, tinted windows, rich textures and bold colours. It is a place that blurs the line between a domestic safe haven and a haunted castle. It grounds the supernatural elements of its story in the visceral reality of a child’s fear.
This is an eccentric, family-friendly horror film that aspires to be heartwarming and oddly therapeutic. It is a stylised, expressionistic piece of genre cinema that undeniably comes from the mind of its director.
Technical Specs:
- The Story: A young girl who believes a monster is hiding beneath her bed hires her mysterious neighbor to kill it, pulling both into a violent, surreal confrontation between childhood fear and the blurred line between imagination and reality.
- Actors: Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sheila Atim, David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson, Sigourney Weaver.
- Director: Bryan Fuller
- Year: 2025
- Cinematographer: Nicole Hirsch Whitaker
- Origin: American Cinema
- Aspect Ratio: 3.00:1
- Genre: Fantasy / Horror
