Dust Bunny (2025) Movie Review: A Mixed Bout of Sadistically Playful Horror for the Whole Family

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Every generation of children has its own collection of formative horror-tinged family fare—the sort of films that seemingly scar them before the slow realization that the lingering tingle down their spines is actually a sign that they might enjoy peeking into the shadows now and again. In an era where children’s media is dominated by short-form algorithms, toothless live-action remakes, and Illumination Animation, one might be justified in fearing that Generation Alpha, among the countless problems facing their upbringing, may be left without any such transitional ventures into the allure of the monsters that lie beneath the bed.

Bryan Fuller is aware of this troubling dearth of childhood nightmare fuel, which is why the debuting film director has made the jump from his own prior comfort zone of television to bring those bedtime monsters to life with a new coat of… well, fur, I guess. The result of this quest to foster tame scares is “Dust Bunny,” which finds its own horrors in a different sort of fostering that leaves some children hoping for terrors of a more controllable variety.

This element of the film is, of course, not made clear right away, as “Dust Bunny” begins with a setup we know all too well: a little girl named Aurora (Sophie Sloan) spends every night terrified to go to sleep because she believes a monster lives under her bed. Her parents don’t believe her, but her refusal to touch the floor for fear of disturbing the beast that lies below the boards proves justified when, one night, the monster finally appears and swallows the guardians whole while Aurora cowers beneath the covers.

As we don’t technically “see” the devouring, whether or not it’s real or all in Aurora’s head is up for debate at the start, as is her perception of her mysterious neighbour from across the hall (Mads Mikkelsen). A man whose wardrobe toes the line between Charlie Sheen, Buddhist-era Lennon, and Paulie Walnuts, this nameless neighbor is seen one night by our precocious protagonist expertly killing a dragon in Chinatown, leading her to enlist his services in the elimination of her own peculiar pest control issue.

The neighbour’s reticence to help Aurora comes from several angles at once: he doesn’t believe in her monster’s existence, but more importantly, he’s rather concerned with what the girl actually saw him do that she interpreted as monster-slaying. This lingering paranoia leads to a surprisingly candid revelation of what this man’s goings on actually pertain to, to the point that his, shall we say, illicit activities come to bear quite directly on Fuller’s plotting.

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Dust Bunny (2025) Movie — A still from “Dust Bunny” (2025)

The end result is a film that proves itself to be surprisingly direct in its confrontation of trauma and the casualness of death without ever laying the drama on too thick, while also finding itself somewhat challenged in its abilities to fully balance its many spinning plates. Fuller’s tactile camera adds weight to the film’s tinges of surrealism peppered among the more grounded spurts of action and comedy in much the same way that a Jim Henson or Alfonso Cuarón would with similar material, though his excessive reliance on CGI and streamer-ready lighting pulls against that sense of weight to the point where the director’s sense of flair is merely weighed-down, its grasp on textured horror drowning in a haze of obviously distant post-production paint.

So, too, does the onscreen chemistry come to be a double-edged blade, as Sloan and Mikkelsen prove to be a force for propulsive interplay that matches the former’s directness with the latter’s stony demeanour in a fashion reminiscent of “Leon: The Professional.” Fuller’s decision to frame their first interaction with the invasive presence of a particular taxidermied chicken makes for a few steady chuckles that seem morbidly fitting for the man behind “Hannibal.” It’s a wry chemistry that never feels as though the characters are talking down to one another, but Fuller’s tendency to veer too far into a verbose back-and-forth does tend to mar “Dust Bunny” in a pervading odor of self-satisfaction unbefitting such otherwise humble efforts.

With that in mind, how much “Dust Bunny” actually manages to communicate without words—particularly in the film’s opening stretch—illustrates a refreshing respect for the audience that, surprisingly, doesn’t dissipate as Fuller begins to increasingly rely on expository nuggets. Impressively, the film manages to use these potentially cumbersome bits of revelation as a means of actually enhancing the narrative, turning this small corner of an apartment complex into a nifty trap for all kinds of monsters to converge. Once the bait has been spilled, though, there’s no getting it back in the box, and like the very films that linger in our childhood minds as sources of scarring, eventually we need to take a good long look at what lies beneath that lid we’ve opened.