Some plot spoilers below for the currently in-theaters feature Dust Bunny, so tread lightly if you haven't yet watched. (But seriously, go watch it.)
Bryan Fuller's feature debut Dust Bunny is the kind of spooky fare that totally made sense to hold as a post-Halloween 2025 movie release. Sure, it's R-rated and gets pretty violent, with lots of people meeting their makers in imaginative ways, but those elements are filtered through many other genres and tones than mere horror. We're talking Mads Mikkelsen as a hitman saving a quirky young girl from a fairy tale boogeyman and the far less fantastical line-up of foes aiming to kill him and anyone in his presence. Plus, it's heavily influenced by Bruce Lee.
To sum that offbeat premise up with a rave: Dust Bunny is a whimsical-ass delight from start to finish. (And I'm not the only one touting its excellence, or using some form of the word "whimsical.") As all my fellow Fuller-heads out there would no doubt agree, it's precisely the movie alchemy one would expect from the brain behind Wonderfalls, Hannibal and Dead Like Me. The director talked with CinemaBlend ahead of Dust Bunny's release, and when I asked about the multi-genre approach to Aurora's story, he told me:
I love horror movies, and I am certainly not afraid of the categorization of a horror movie, but I would sort of categorize this more as a fairy tale, or gateway horror. I think gateway horror is probably the fairest categorization for it. . . . Because it's scary, but it's not too scary. There's violence, but there's not terrible violence. There's something about being able to play with all of those things. If you're looking at classic fairy tales, whether it's Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel, there's elements of wit and comedy and terror, and all of those things that suggest a melding of genres already.
Much like a tale from the Brothers Grimm, Dust Bunny gets right into the thick of it with Sophie Sloan's school-age Aurora. Her living situation seems normal enough at first, despite the fact that she so easily slips away and follows her unnamed neighbor, Resident 5B, into town and watches him take down a massive dragon via shadow magic. (At least that's what it felt like while watching.) Without drawing attention to it, that early sequence cleanly sets up the split dynamic between Aurora and her neighbor's perspectives.
Bryan Fuller talked about bringing the various narrative strands together with these two characters guiding the way, but without holding the audience's collective hands by way of exposition. As he put it:
Then as we got into like, 'Okay, if this is about a little girl who hires a hit man to kill the monster under her bed,' there is going to be an access of that assassin world that we have to represent through the lens of the greater fairy tale, and certainly things that are staples of all those genres that we got to deal with in shorthand. So we didn't have to dedicate so much real estate to creating an assassin dynamic or creating a monster dynamic. Instead, we are just following our young protagonist and trusting, and not trusting, her reliability as the narrator for this story, if that makes sense.
Now, we obviously can't talk about Mads Mikkelsen's character literally entering a dragon (or at least a giant parade decoration of a dragon) without getting back into the Bruce Lee of it all. The martial arts legend, who was a movie and TV star on top of everything else, didn't live long enough to reach the age of CGI dragons on Game of Thrones. But I bet Lee and Mikkelsen's character could have overpowered all of those beasts. Or at least one of them.
Fuller talked about that early fight sequence was so key to not just the rest of the movie, but for his longtime kinship with his lead actor.
In the dragon fight at the beginning with Maz, we were doing this big homage to Bruce Lee. Maz and I, one of our first things that we bonded over was our love for Bruce Lee. Maz beaned himself many times as a kid practicing nunchucks in the bathroom. So it was like, 'Okay, you love Bruce. I love Bruce. Let's do a nunchuck fight .That'll be like the weapon of the intriguing neighbor.'
Anyone who's ever tried to use nunchucks as a child without any guidance likely also knocked themselves stupid more than once. But how many can say they grew up to play Hannibal Lecter and a hitman living his best Bruce Lee life?
A project whose life began 10 years earlier as a potential episode of Amazing Stories, Dust Bunny turned into a joyful highlight reel for Bryan Fuller in terms of what he was getting to do, and it sounds like all involved were happy to work hard to bring this unique vision to life. It helps when you get to use your actor's name in the fighting style, as Fuller does here:
Being able to sort of share that gift with my friend and also shoot a Bruce Lee inspired - I just called it Mads Fu - sequence that was both broad but grounded enough that people who love those things will get something out of it, and kids will also be like, 'How can I see more?' Not only is it gateway horror, but it's also gateway kung fu in a fun way. So hoping that kids will have their appetites whetted in a way that they seek out more movies that are either inspiring films like Dust Bunny or are the OG samples of it.
Gateway kung fu horror sounds like the coolest movie genre possible for my 9-year-old self. And definitely also my 43-year-old self. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed Dust Bunny's monstrous frights and kinetic fights at any age.
Speaking of the fights, Bryan Fuller told me the excellent story that one of Dust Bunny's other fantastic action sequences — the hallway fight — was choreographed in part using an iPhone video of action figures flipping around. He shared:
We were kind of frustrated with the hallway fight with the Christina Ricci, Wednesday Addams guy who's dressed in the wallpaper. One weekend, I was like, 'Just come over to my apartment. I'll bring a model of the the hallway set, and I've got two Bruce Lee action figures here and different costumes. We're just going to choreograph it, shoot it on my iPhone and then hand it to the stunt coordinators and say this is what we're doing.
Everybody needs that kind of playtime to shake up the usual drudgery of work. But I dare say that's an enviable example of playtime pulling double duties as work. And the video evidence is out there.
There's a really fun video of Mads playing with Bruce Lee action figures, recreating the choreography that we had designed together. So I was running the camera, and he was doing the stuntmen, and it was things like that where I was like, 'Okay, we're having fun. This is perhaps more fun than we should be having.' But part of it is just that wild, wild west independent filmmaking, kind of like DIY.
If Hollywood could ever go back to a point where indie filmmakers were more prevalent and as valuable to theater chains as would-be-blockbuster directors, maybe Dust Bunny wouldn't feel like such a singular experience. Wait, no, it absolutely would, since Bryan Fuller is one of a kind.
As is the adorable Sophie Sloan, who is somehow just as much of an eye-catching talent as Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver, who also brings the goods as Resident 5B's superior. Other co-stars include David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson, and Sheila Atim.
Dust Bunny is in theaters now, and I hear the monster under your seat will go get your popcorn if you ask real nice. Not like normal nice, but really nice.
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