TV legend Bryan Fuller, known for his cult classic television series like “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal,” just earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his first feature, “Dust Bunny.” It’s somehow a surprise that the well-known TV creator just directed his first film after spending almost three decades working in television, on series like “Dead Like Me” and “American Gods.” Now, he turns to the world of indie movies, reuniting with actor Mads Mikkelsen, his Hannibal Lecter, on the dark fairy tale “Dust Bunny.”
Fuller has a thing for idioms, exploring these tropes to their most extreme ends (e.g., “pushing daisies”), and so in “Dust Bunny,” he imagines what those bits of fluff could be if our nightmares came to life. He also posits an outlandish notion: what if a kid hired an assassin to kill the monster under her bed?
Aurora (Sophia Sloan) is an imaginative young girl who hears things that roar and scream in the night, the dust bunny under her bed a ravenous, monstrous thing. When her parents go missing, she’s convinced they’ve been eaten by the monster bunny, and seeks out the services of an “intriguing neighbor” (Mikkelsen, that’s how he’s credited), whom she has seen vanquishing dragons in the alley outside. With a fee that she purloins from a church collection plate, she implores him for help, and he agrees, as he learns more about this young girl’s challenging childhood.
At first, “Dust Bunny” feels a little light, the story skittering across its densely designed surface, with very little dialogue in the first half. But it grows and grows, more bits and pieces of story accumulating together as Fuller reveals this strange, heightened world. We meet Intriguing Neighbor’s handler Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), revealing the larger, Wick-ian world of killers that he inhabits. Wicked Laverne chomps through her scenes like the monster bunny chomps through the floorboards — literally, as she consumes charcuterie, dumplings and “suckling pig tea sandwiches” with gusto. Indeed, some monsters are seated across the table, Cheshire cat grinning in florals.
The film is essentially “Leon: The Professional” meets “Amelie” (one of Fuller’s favorite films), but with his distinct wit and flair. But that style also means that “Dust Bunny” is quite fussy and mannered, and if you don’t buy into the film’s arch humor and stylized world, you’re liable to bounce right off of it. As Fuller opens the world up, revealing a sly FBI agent (Sheila Atim) and more and more baddies (David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson), the story becomes more intriguing beyond its unwieldy childhood trauma metaphor, but there’s also not quite enough embroidered on this tapestry. It feels shallow, the world only gestured toward, not fleshed out.
Fuller demonstrates a strong command over his visual domain, but the pat allegory he presents about the monsters with whom we have to learn to live feels a bit muddled. Sloan and Mikkelsen are terrific together, but you feel that there is much more they could sink their teeth into here, and perhaps the limits of the story reveal the limits of the budget, carefully wallpapered over with opulent production design — explosions of patterns and color crafted by Jeremy Reed, captured with shadowy but lush cinematography by Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.
Fuller’s foray into film feels like a first feature — a bit of a surprise for someone so experienced. But the project sports his signature style, even if it doesn’t add up to much more than a neat kiddie-centric hard-R genre exercise.
Katie Walsh is a critic for Tribune News Service.
“Dust Bunny” — 2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for some violence)
Running time: 1:46
How to watch: In theaters Dec. 12