“Dust Bunny” will certainly make you reconsider those pesky little tumbleweeds that collect in the corners of your home. In this dialogue-light thriller, we meet young Aurora, played by Sophie Sloan, who lives with her foster parents in an aging apartment building. She’s terrified to fall asleep, warning—with the sparse language the film allows her—that a monster is trying to eat her. The adults reassure her, naturally, until they are abruptly devoured themselves. Left alone, Aurora follows a neighbor, portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen, and soon realizes he possesses unusually refined monster-fighting skills. She promptly hires him to kill the beast.
What follows is a genre mash-up that lands somewhere between Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino: dark, violent, occasionally flirtatious with comedy, and yet never fully embracing any singular tone. A stray one-liner may hint at humor, but the levity is swiftly buried, much like the Dust Bunny himself, beneath heavy, dark floorboards. The film becomes increasingly repetitive: monster bad, hunter hunting monster. We see that the hunter is conflicted, possibly starting a surrogate-father dynamic, but this thread never develops into a coherent emotional arc, just like all the others. Writer-director Bryan Fuller seems unwilling to commit to one tonal direction, and the film suffers for it.
Mikkelsen, as always, is compelling and capable of carrying far more than he’s given here, and Sigourney Weaver brings presence to a role that feels similarly underutilized. Sloan shows genuine promise, but the script gives her little opportunity to shine. The creature design and special effects are impressively unsettling and this becomes a child’s nightmare fully realized, however, the film’s violence and intensity push it well beyond any family-friendly categorization. (It is R-rated.) Meanwhile, adults looking for narrative substance or stylistic consistency may find themselves disengaged.
Ultimately, “Dust Bunny” never decides what it wants to be, and the result is a film that is too frightening for children, too thin for adults, and too scattered to satisfy fans of any particular genre. Mikkelsen remains a draw and while he rarely misjudges a project, both he and Weaver may prefer this one be swept quickly under the rug.
1 Star