Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny is abundant in idiosyncrasies. The main plot, for one, is essentially a dark fantasy spin on Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional. A wise-beyond-her-years young girl, Aurora (Sophie Sloan), is orphaned when her parents are killed by the monster under her bed. At least, that’s what she thinks happened. So she decides to hire an assassin, known only as Resident 5B (Mads Mikkelsen), who lives on the same floor of her apartment building to hunt the beast down before it gobbles her up too.
Sloan is the best thing about the Fuller’s film. She’s endearingly precocious, explaining her predicament to Resident 5B with the weary self-assurance of a child waiting for the grown-ups to catch up. It’s no small thing to hold your own against an actor of Mikkelsen’s gravitas at such a young age, and while the secretly kindhearted Resident 5B is too one-dimensional a character for Mikkelsen to do much with it, he and Sloan strike up a sweet chemistry.
While Aurora’s precociousness is charming, Dust Bunny’s is much less so. It’s a clear line from Fuller’s Pushing Daisies to his feature-length directorial debut, which shares the TV show’s aggressively vibrant aesthetic and tonal blend of the macabre and the twee. Perhaps Fuller was aiming for a Wes Anderson-inspired look, but he lands closer to the late-period, green-screen-heavy work of Tim Burton or Robert Rodriguez. There’s also a fidgetiness to the shots, with the camera swooping and sliding and switching in anamorphic lenses like it’s afraid to sit still.
The first half hour or so of Dust Bunny is elegantly told in near-silence, but once the characters start yapping, they never stop. Very much reminiscent of Anderson, the dialogue here is delivered in a stilted deadpan and filled with repetitions and odd phrasings. It’s the sort of writing that begs you to find it cute and quirky, which makes it quite grating if you don’t. Even the good jokes, like an amusing back and forth between Resident 5B and Aurora about how her name is pronounced, are run into the ground by continual callbacks.
But even if it had a more finally tuned script and visual sensibility, it’s hard to tell what Dust Bunny actually wants to be. Fuller has talked up the influence of Joe Dante’s Gremlins, and his desire to put real darkness and scares back in kids’ films. That’s a worthwhile ambition, but while Dante’s classic inflicted most of its more gruesome mischief on little green puppets, Dust Bunny sees Resident 5B shooting real people with realistic guns, stringing one of them up so he can bleed him out in a bathtub and jamming an electric toothbrush into another one’s eye.
Even if Fuller’s film weren’t rated R, it’d still be too grim by half to be much fun for younger viewers. But, then, thanks to some unremarkable fight choreography and unsightly CGI, it’s also hard to imagine older audiences deriving much fun from it either.
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