Sometimes, I’ll go into a movie without ever having seen a trailer because the cast or director was enough to lure me into the theater. When I heard that director Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen were teaming up again years after Hannibal was cancelled after three seasons by NBC, that was all I needed to know. One ticket for Dust Bunny, please!
This film follows Aurora (Sophie Sloan) living with her third foster family. Her wild, whimsical imagination has her seeing a literal dust bunny. Her neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen), we’ll call him 5B for he has no name, is someone she takes interest in as she follows him into a fight with some baddies. Her childish interpretation of the events is that he was fighting monsters, including a dragon. When the dust bunny in her room becomes hungry and eats her foster parents, Aurora tries to hire 5B to kill the monster for her. He tries to explain to her how her view of events is really her childish mind trying to deal with the trauma of witnessing her foster parents killed by men who mistook her apartment for his. He believes her interpretation is figurative, not literal. Even as the FBI show up investigating 5B and the girl’s missing foster parents, she willfully believes the dust bunny is real in a childishly stubborn show of righteousness. That this bunny lives beneath the floor and only comes out at night and the adults should get off the floor. It isn’t until the FBI, 5B’s enemies, and 5B himself are all in the apartment that they realize maybe the little girl wasn’t playing make believe after all.
This first half of this film is a back and forth between 5B and Aurora that has the viewer believing that she is making up her monsters because she is too young to deal with her trauma. The second half of the film, however, goes to places where you are both expecting and not expecting. Is it real or isn’t it? I assumed this would be one of those films that leaves the ending open to interpretation, like Inception. No, this film goes there. Makes you believe in the unbelievable. That is the film’s greatest success.
The apartment building is whimsically beautiful. The perfect setting for a descent into a little girl’s version of her own Wonderland. It’s colorful and decorated in patterns that shouldn’t work but somehow do, just like this little girl’s story. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Even the obvious CGI of the dust bunny is so creative that it perfectly fits the narrative, like it is meant to look fake, a figment of a small child’s imagination, but the characters believe it exists so the viewer does too. Cinematography uses these things to its advantage to create a film that is equal parts Pan’s Labyrinth and a John Wick style world of assassins. Like everything else in the film, these two ideals clash in an adult vs. child viewpoint of what monsters are. How Bryan Fuller managed this fete, I don’t know, but its a great film to watch unfold.
Mads Mikkelsen and Sophie Sloan are joined by Sigourney Weaver, Shiela Atim, and David Dastmalchain. A well rounded cast to tell this story. Each is memorable in their own right, but it is the dynamic between Mikkelsen and Sloan that really sells this film. The two share such a funny yet heartwarming father/daughter chemistry that it adds a deeper meaning to the film as both characters needed someone to really belong to. Sometimes, home is a person.
4 out of 5 stars for this inventive, funny, visually stunning film that just made it into my top 10 for 2025.
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Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
Sometimes, I’ll go into a movie without ever having seen a trailer because the cast or director was enough to lure me into the theater. When I heard that director Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen were teaming up again years after Hannibal was cancelled after three seasons by NBC, that was all I needed to know. One ticket for Dust Bunny, please!
This film follows Aurora (Sophie Sloan) living with her third foster family. Her wild, whimsical imagination has her seeing a literal dust bunny. Her neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen), we’ll call him 5B for he has no name, is someone she takes interest in as she follows him into a fight with some baddies. Her childish interpretation of the events is that he was fighting monsters, including a dragon. When the dust bunny in her room becomes hungry and eats her foster parents, Aurora tries to hire 5B to kill the monster for her. He tries to explain to her how her view of events is really her childish mind trying to deal with the trauma of witnessing her foster parents killed by men who mistook her apartment for his. He believes her interpretation is figurative, not literal. Even as the FBI show up investigating 5B and the girl’s missing foster parents, she willfully believes the dust bunny is real in a childishly stubborn show of righteousness. That this bunny lives beneath the floor and only comes out at night and the adults should get off the floor. It isn’t until the FBI, 5B’s enemies, and 5B himself are all in the apartment that they realize maybe the little girl wasn’t playing make believe after all.
This first half of this film is a back and forth between 5B and Aurora that has the viewer believing that she is making up her monsters because she is too young to deal with her trauma. The second half of the film, however, goes to places where you are both expecting and not expecting. Is it real or isn’t it? I assumed this would be one of those films that leaves the ending open to interpretation, like Inception. No, this film goes there. Makes you believe in the unbelievable. That is the film’s greatest success.
The apartment building is whimsically beautiful. The perfect setting for a descent into a little girl’s version of her own Wonderland. It’s colorful and decorated in patterns that shouldn’t work but somehow do, just like this little girl’s story. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Even the obvious CGI of the dust bunny is so creative that it perfectly fits the narrative, like it is meant to look fake, a figment of a small child’s imagination, but the characters believe it exists so the viewer does too. Cinematography uses these things to its advantage to create a film that is equal parts Pan’s Labyrinth and a John Wick style world of assassins. Like everything else in the film, these two ideals clash in an adult vs. child viewpoint of what monsters are. How Bryan Fuller managed this fete, I don’t know, but its a great film to watch unfold.
Mads Mikkelsen and Sophie Sloan are joined by Sigourney Weaver, Shiela Atim, and David Dastmalchain. A well rounded cast to tell this story. Each is memorable in their own right, but it is the dynamic between Mikkelsen and Sloan that really sells this film. The two share such a funny yet heartwarming father/daughter chemistry that it adds a deeper meaning to the film as both characters needed someone to really belong to. Sometimes, home is a person.
4 out of 5 stars for this inventive, funny, visually stunning film that just made it into my top 10 for 2025.
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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