Dust Bunny

After the monstrous dust bunny under her bed devours her parents, a young girl hires her hitman neighbor to kill the monster, but their efforts are interrupted by some assassins.

Eight-year-old Aurora lives in a somewhat nightmarish, fairytale-like version of New York City.

While lying on the fire escape outside her room one night, a firefly draws her attention to her neighbor down the hall. Never named, he is known simply as 5B. Intrigued, she follows him to Chinatown. There, she watches from a rooftop as he kills what looks to her like a rampaging dragon, due to it being a dark alley filled with shadows and smoke from firecrackers, but in actually it's an armed gang in a dragon dance puppet.

Meanwhile, a dust bunny begins to form beneath her bed…

Increasingly convinced that there’s a monster under her bed, Aurora can’t get her parents to believe her that all of their lives are in danger. She warns her parents to avoid stepping on her bedroom floor, as this will draw out the monster. They make soothing and dismissive noises at her, and seeing that they can’t be saved, Aurora tells them goodbye. Hiding under her blanket that night, she listens to the sounds of her parents being torn apart.

In the morning, there’s no sign of them. She’s alone.

With no other options, forced to traverse her apartment on the back of a large wheeled hippo in order to avoid touching the floor, and with no one else to turn to, Aurora pulls off a heist, walking away with the church collection plate.

She gives the money to 5B, asking if it is enough to “procure” his services. He is curious where she learned a word like “procure,” and she tells him that she got it from a Word of the Day desk calendar. Other than that, 5B isn’t interested in the job, assuring her that here’s no such thing as monsters, only monstrous people, and that it was humans who murdered her parents, suggesting that it may have been some criminals, or perhaps someone with a grudge. What he doesn’t tell her is that he believes that her parents were mistakenly killed by assassins who were actually looking for him. 5B also tells this to his handler, Laverne, later that day at lunch, but she assures him that everything is fine.

That evening, a pair of hitmen arrive at Aurora's apartment. 5B kills one, but before he can get to the other one, they seem to disappear.

In actuality, the monster devours her.

In the immediate aftermath, there's a knock at the door, and 5B answers to find Brenda, a child protection agent, standing there. He manages to reassure Brenda that Aurora is fine and well-taken care of, without Brenda coming in and finding the dead body in the apartment. In the process, Brenda reveals that Aurora's birth parents, as well as three different sets of foster parents, have all disappeared. 5B is surprised to hear this, but sends Brenda on her way.

It turns out, Brenda is actually with the FBI.

Aurora and 5B meet with his handler, Laverne, who reveals that she hired the assassins because Aurora is a loose end, due to her having witnessed 5B's fight in Chinatown. He doesn’t appreciate that, and he and Laverne part ways. That night, at a Chinese restaurant, Aurora and 5B meet a "Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man" and it's clear that Laverne has hired that man to kill them.

That night, Aurora, 5B, the Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man and his team of assassins, and Brenda and the FBI, face each other in Aurora's apartment. There's a big firefight, but it's interrupted by the monster—a giant, hairy bunny-creature—erupting from beneath the floor and devouring everyone but Aurora, leaving her alone once again.

But in the morning, 5B emerges from the floor, as he had accidentally applied a thumb-sucking deterrent the previous night, which the monster does not like. Laverne shows up, and it is revealed that she's 5B’s mother. The monster re-emerges and devours Laverne, despite the fact that her high heels are actually guns. The monster then moves to attack 5B, but Aurora instinctually stands between them, and discovers that she can control the monster.

5B and Aurora leave the city to start a new life together, and their car's shadow is shaped like the dust bunny running with them. A mid-credits scene reveals that Brenda managed to survive the previous night's monster attack by hiding in a wall ironing board cabinet.

“Little girl hires a hitman to kill the monster under her bed” is a really great concept, and the storybook styling of the film is perfect for it, but unfortunately, this story of deadly dust bunnies and assassins is all style and no substance. But that’s writer/director Bryan Fuller for me, someone who has written a lot of stuff that in theory I should like—Star Trek: Discovery, American Gods, Heroes, etc.—but in actuality, I always find to be lacking.

Style-wise, Dusty Bunny is pretty good. It’s reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet meets Tim Burton meets Wes Anderson, with a bit of Besson’s Professional, as well as some flourishes from Gremlins and Critters thrown in for good measure, and all of it told with a very Men In Black sensibility. It’s a pretty fun mix, even if it does end up feeling a bit hollowly applied, in a clearly cribbed from better sources kind of way, rather than an actual homage, and either way, it's all muddied by too much CGI too often. Still, the monsters look great, whether it’s the half-glimpsed shadow dragon whirling about in a hazy Chinatown alley, or the Dust Bunny itself, which looks like one of the big scary Muppets. Plus, several of the sequences, like the whole Collection Plate Heist, look pretty great too.

Bottom line? It’s got a good look, no doubt there.

Unfortunately, as I said, the story doesn’t equal the look. Most of the film’s “big” reveals end up feeling too disconnected from the rest of the story. Either they were things that were never really a question, so who cares, or they were never given any narrative weight after being revealed, so who cares? Either way, they all land with a thud. And despite having a great cast who play well together, it really just works way too hard to make the relationship between Aurora and 5B touching and sweet and funny and earnest, but without really establishing it, as it is clearly hoping the audience will automatically fill in the blanks using the well-known Lone Wolf and Cub trope that is familiar in films like… well, Lone Wolf and Cub, for one, but The Professional and Logan, amongst others. And it ends up fine too, Mads Mikkelsen is always great, and Sophie Sloan, in her first feature film, is too, but it also never feels like anything more than a perfunctory and very understood set-up. The worst misstep is the way the film plays the “maybe the monster is only in her head” card for far too long. It’s a plot point that doesn’t fit with the tone of the film. For one, when the whole world looks like a live-action cartoon, having monsters be such an outrageous idea seems like an odd choice. It just feels incongruous. Plus, I don’t know why the film even bothers to do this in the first place, as the audience knows the whole time that the monster is real. It’s such a strange waste of time. The result is a film that is a lot of fluff, but not in a good “fairytale” way.

Maybe it would've been better if he actually was a real Monster Hunter?

But that's neither here nor there, I guess, as the milk has been spilled. So, while obviously very confident, and very deliberate in its look, Dust Bunny ultimately ends up feeling a bit rushed, overly-CGIed, and stranded between its clashing “realistic” and cartoonish tones, all while reaching too hard to be sweet and endearing. In short, this is cinematic cotton candy and just as substantial.