Fairy Tale Noir
Bryan Fuller’s first film is huge visual swing and a marvel at not talking down to kids.
Dust Bunny
Director: Bryan Fuller • Writer: Bryan Fuller
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian
USA • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong January 22 • IIA
Grade: B+
At the beginning of Dust Bunny, eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) crawls into bed and under the special covers – you know the ones, we all had them – that protect her from the monster under her bed, which also lives under the floor. The monster that appears to be a massive, methed-out dust bunny Aurora’s parents don’t believe is there. Too freaked out to sleep, she takes the cool covers outside onto the fire escape to sleep there, far from the floor, a vantage point from which she also sees her enigmatic neighbour in 5B (Mads Mikkelsen) slink off into the night. A few days later, despite her warnings, the Monster Under the Bed indeed eats her parents, so Aurora does what any self-sufficient third-grader would do. She tails Mr 5B one night, finds out he’s a monster slayer, robs the local church and hires him to kill the mad bunny (Monty Python would be so proud). This is all drawn in glorious hyper-Technicolor and fluid camera movements in an almost dialogue-free opening half-hour.
Director Bryan Fuller is recognised most for the cotton-candy whimsy of Pushing Daisies, the meticulously stylised brutality of Hannibal (starring the best Lecter, Mikkelsen – fight me) and as creator of “new Trek” Star Trek: Discovery. Dust Bunny is an almost perfect marriage of those first two aesthetics, with a bevy of seasonings mixed in: A dash of Pan’s Labyrinth, a touch of John Wick, some Bad Times at the El Royale retro styling (by production designer Jeremy Reed, who earned his paycheque). In less confident hands this would be GTFOH derivative, but Fuller’s big swing is a singular distillation of childhood horrors, how kids process trauma, guilt and rage and unfettered childhood imagination that Roald Dahl and CS Lewis would give props to. Above all Fuller’s genre mash-up deserves space on big screens because Nicole Hirsch Whitaker’s (Netflix’s live action One Piece) super-widescreen 3.00:1 (!) cinematography (wider than Sinners) makes every composition a wonder that elevates the more on the nose imagery and metaphors.
Where do I get a chicken lamp?
Naturally, there’s more to the story. It turns out Mikkelsen’s Mr 5B has a job that gets him all kinds of attention of the ballistic kind, and though he may be some kind of criminal, he decides to help out his young neighbour, whose parents he’s clearly gotten mixed up in shenanigans; he feels a bit guilty. That vexes his imperious handler, the Winston-ian Laverne (Sigourney Weaver, absolutely crushing it) to his John Wick. She doesn’t like the idea of having any witnesses around to tell anyone who Mr 5B is. Besides, it turns out Aurora’s parents weren’t her parents; they were her third foster family, which gets Brenda from Child and Family Services (Sheila Atim, The Woman King) snooping around and parsing Aurora’s claims all her families were killed by the Monster Under the Bed. Before you can say “clean up crew” Laverne has the Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man (David Dastmalchian, Dune, Late Night with the Devil) and his partner, the Intimidating Woman (Rebecca Henderson, The Acolyte) lurking around the retro-deco apartment tower. Through it all, Mr 5B utterly rocks a string of separates and sweatsuits apparently made from carpet and drapery fabrics, and consistently has difficulty saying Aurora’s name (a great running gag).
Some of what makes Dust Bunny work is Fuller’s abject refusal to talk down to its audience (everyone) or treat Aurora like anything but an autonomous character. He totally flirts with Wes Anderson tweeness but manages to avoid tipping over into insufferability; Aurora’s precocious in that movie kid way, but she never slips into irritating. She’s wise beyond her years without being eye-rolling. It’s a tricky balance to strike but Fuller and Sloan do, nicely realising the concepts that separate her imagination from reality – all split diopters, long dollying and heightened spaces.
Despite earning an R rating in the US, Dust Bunny is essentially a family film and a nice chunk of gateway horror. It may not be for very young kids, but the on-the-nose metaphors and familiar messaging the adults in the room may groan at are designed for children. The ideas that some monsters are real, and that they can follow us forever are well worn, but they’re crucial to that gateway. It’s probably why Fuller stacked the rest of the screenplay with wit and snark for the stacked cast to play with. Mikkelsen and Sloan bounce off each other as if they’ve known each other for years, and he never treats her as anything but an equal, as do Mikkelsen and Weaver who, again, is crushing it with a combination of dismissiveness and calculating as only she can make look cool. The rest of the cast pitch their performances perfectly, and watching Dastmalchian and Henderson desperately try to defy some cops when they’re told to “Get on the floor” is low-key brilliant – the kind of react that’s so easy to overdo or underdo, and so blow it. Dust Bunny isn’t new, but it’s a classic, engaging tale, executed well with steady direction, by a strong cast and gorgeous visuals. Fun for the whole family.