"Dust Bunny" Review

 Bryan Fuller's name is associated with a string of beloved, borderline cult classic TV series such as Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, American Gods, and Hannibal which he created over the past two decades, but it is only now that he crosses over in to movies with his directorial debut, Dust Bunny, a bonkers fantasy horror movie that completely tanked at the box office with less than $1M grossed, but will probably become a minor word-of-mouth cult classic when it hits streaming.

Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is a young girl who takes the whole "the floor is lava" thing to the extreme, pushing herself around the apartment on a large metal hippopotamus statue on wheels with a broom like an oar. She parkours on the furniture to get to her bed and sleeps on the fire escape outside her window because she's convinced there is a monster living under the floorboards that will eat her. She repeatedly tells her parents to stay off the floor and while they assure her there's nothing under the bed, one night there are horrible sounds and she awakes to an empty, trashed apartment, her parents gone. She seems oddly calm about it though.

One night while on the fire escape she noticed a neighbor - listed as Intriguing Neighbor on IMDB and 5B (as in the apartment number) on Wikipedia, played by Mads Mikkelsen - down the hall leaving and going off into the night, so the next night she follows him into Chinatown where she sees him kill a dragon. (Actually, a Chinese dragon parade thing with Triad soldiers inside it.) After her parents disappear, she steals a church collection plate to get money to hire 5B to kill the monster under her bed.

Naturally, he thinks this is ludicrous, but when a pair of assassins show up to kill the girl and are apparently eaten by something, he begins to wonder what's going on? He meets a woman, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver acting like Parker Posey), at a Chinese restaurant with a giant fish tank with a large shark in it and it's revealed she's involved and there are more killers on the way.

It's hard to synopsize Dust Bunny because it's less about the plot and mostly about the wild visual style. Before we started a user review on the screen stated, "A Roald Dahl story, written by a bag of cocaine, directed by Wes Anderson," and they're not far off. Others have evoked Tim Burton or described it as a mashup of Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional and Where the Wild Things Are. 

The production design of Jeremy Reed combines with Nicole Hirsch Whitaker's lush, moody cinematography - filmed in an unheard of 3:1 aspect ratio, even wider than that of epics like Ben-Hur or Quentin Taratino's The Hateful Eight which were shot in 2.76:1 - is the big selling point here. Fuller has always had an eye for visuals (Pushing Daisies' sunflowers get a callout at the end), but the story itself and its too-familiar elements like Mikkelsen's very quiet hitman echoing Jean Reno's Leon caused me to drift off in spots even though I wanted to study the visuals. In addition to the gorgeous visuals, the audio track is great for annoying your neighbors with your subwoofer as the titular bunny rumbles hard.

I've seen debate as to whether this is a kid-friendly horror film. There's no blood and the kills are more stylized than graphic and I don't recall anything that made it R-rating worthy (perhaps a few F-bombs too many), but I guess younger children who worry about monsters under their beds wouldn't benefit from watching a monster under a bed eating people.

I'm also not sure what the overall point was supposed to be; whether the bunny was a metaphorical or metaphysical monster. The final shot (not counting a brief mid-credits gag) also raises a question as to what the bunny is. There's also a weird moment where 5B states who the child welfare officer really is before she admits it herself that doesn't make sense how he'd know this.

But don't let my quibbles deter you from checking out Dust Bunny, a movie with far more going for it than its opaque and clearly difficult to marker title. Good performances and great style overcome the slight plot.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.