Toronto 2025 Review: DUST BUNNY, Brightly Coloured Slaughter Entertains

Under the bed, in the closet, hiding behind the curtains: monsters always find places to hide in a child's bedroom. Is the monster just a figment of a child's imagination, encouraged by bedtime stories and an active mind? Is it displacement of a real human monster, too often found in the home? It might be that those we think are monsters have something of a good heart, and that children's imaginations can manifest terrible things.

Bryan Fuller is best known for two very different kinds of television shows: Pushing Daisies (of which he was the creator) and Hannibal (of which he was the developer and show runner). Well, they were both about murder and detecting, but it's safe to say that they had very different aesthetics and levels of violence. His new feature film Dust Bunny is arguably a combination of the two: with the colour and joie de vivre of the former, combined weith the violence and darkness in situation of the latter.

Young Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is not getting much sleep. There's a monster under her bed in the form of a bunny, and it's keeping her up at night. She can't touch the floor; in fact, no one can after dark, and she tries to warn her parents of the danger. But one night, they make the mistake of leaving her door open; Aurora hears a terrible commotion, and the next day, her parents are gone. But Aurora has an idea: she has figured out that her neighbour, Hit Man (Mads Mikkelsen) is a hit man, and she wants to hire him to kill the monster.

Aurora knows this, because she followed him one night, as he made his way through Chinatown and seemed to defeat a dragon. But this is a child's imagination, of course, and what seemed like a dragon to Aurora, were several men in costume. For he is indeed a hitman, and he keeps telling her that while the kinds of monsters that Aurora imagines aren't real, that there are very human monsters out there that want him dead, and he might be inadvertently responsible for the death of her parents. And so he reluctantly begins to help the girl.

Everything in Aurora's world is full of colour, swirling and spotted as any child might wish. Animals of the stuffed and bronze variety fill her world. In opposition, Hit Man's world is dull. While he does wear a track suit (in one scene, a yellow one, in clear homage to The Bride) to do his various killing jobs, he has little time for anything aesthetically pleasing. He is in opposition to the world that Fuller and the production design and art team create, but deliberately so. He has walked a dark path for a long time, and can never quite blend in. This is a fairy tale, after all, and one that combines both the pastels and anthropomorphised creatures, but like the original fairy tales, there's also a lot of violence and death.

Aurora's had to grow up a lot faster than she would wish. With a concept such as this, we expect the gruff adult/cute kid dynamic to be at the heart of it, and it is. But it's not so much about Aurora acting like a silly child and the adult acting mean. Hit Man knows that something is wrong, it's just not what Aurora thinks. And she is smarter than most adults give her credit for in trying to find a solution to her problem. She wears him down not with her cuteness (or not just with that), but her logic, and the mounting evidence that her monster theory might not be entirely off the mark.

Apart from a bit of a third act slump, the pace moves along briskly. Mikkelsen is at home in this world, despite being the grey against the bright pinks and yellows, as he is in any action or drama film. If this was one of those memes, Hit Man is the human surrounded by a lot of proverbial Muppets, and the actor's dancing training certainly comes in handy. The action scenes are an entertaining combination of the somewhat fantastic with some standard but clever gun play and fist fights.

Supporting actors Sigourney Weaver, as the hit man's overseer, Sheila Atim as an FBI agent, and David Dastmalchian and Rebecca Henderson as two fellow hit-people who are targeting Mikkelsen, clearly understand that Fuller wants his fantasy world to be accepted and taken seriously. Once the truth is revealed, there is shock and amazement, but the fairy tale elements are never treated as less than important. These stylized performances, along with the fantastical aesthetics and monsters of varying species all make us understand that it's not just trauma and sadness than can contributor to a child's imagination, but anger. Children are people too and their fears should not be treated lightly.

Dust Bunny will certainly appeal to fans of Fuller's television work, given how it straddles the line between whimsy and gruesomeness. It's a highly enjoyable tale with an adorable kid and an adorable curmudgeon who learn to have each other's backs.