WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD! It’s impossible to say much about this film without them!
Talk about an unlikely movie: the description was kind of off-putting֮—it came out about December 11, and I read this: “Dust Bunny, Directed by Bryan Fuller. With Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sheila Atim, David Dastmalchian. An eight-year-old girl asks her scheming neighbor for help in killing the monster under her bed that she thinks ate her family.” But I was bored with a lot of the new movies and we went in anyhow. I have been a fan of Mads Mikkelson since before he played “Le Chiffre” in the Daniel Craig Casino Royale; this Danish actor is one you can count on to play a bad guy with chilling affect. So I figured it couldn’t be too bad; also, I’ve seen David Dastmalchian in a few movies and thought he was good too, so what the heck? Also, it was directed and written by Bryan Fuller (Figure 2), who created Pushing Daisies, a TV series which was a quirky genre TV series about a young woman who could bring the dead back to life temporarily, which Lynne (my wife, the Beautiful & Talented Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk) and I both liked, and which was discontinued (IMO) too soon. I recently found out he also wrote a couple of Star Trek: Voyager episodes and created Star Trek: Discovery.
To be candid, I thought it was going to be either an action gangster movie with a cute kid, kinda like both Bruce Willis and Jason Statham have done, or some dreary movie about a cute kid whose fantasies, probably featuring unicorns and fairy princesses, come to life. I was praying for the former.
Holy cow, were we ever surprised! This movie is sui generis, a one-of-a-kind little beauty written and directed by the aforementioned Bryan F and, (something the poster shows, but the sysnopsis fails to mention) also with Sigourney Weaver. I’d never heard ot Sophie Sloan (Figure 3), who is more like ten or eleven years old than the eight mentioned in the précis, but not much older, and she is a budding star, if she continues in this vein. The main characters are these: Mikkelson plays “Intriguing Neighbor” (US spelling); Sloan plays Aurora (one of the few named characters in the movie; Dastmalchian plays the “Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man; Weaver plays “Laverne,” and Atim plays “Brenda.” As far as I know, there are no other actual names in the whole movie.
I can’t give the entire plot, because half the fun is in finding stuff out, right? But I’ll go as far as I dare; there will be some spoilers but I’ll try to keep them to a minimum. Aurora is (about) a ten-year-old girl, in a fifth-floor apartment in a big city (unnamed, but we’re supposed to think it’s NYC, I believe. The movie’s actually filmed, it seems, in Hungary.) She has a room with a fire-escape balcony, your standard wrought-iron kind of thing. When the movie opens we see a bit of fluff flying down from the sky and entering her room, scumbling across the floor and gathering other bits of dust and fluff as it goes; finally, it becomes a literal dust bunny, about the size of a watermelon.
There are some creaking noises under the bed, and Aurora’s parents rush in; she tells them “There’s a monster under my bed and it wants to kill me.” and “Don’t touch the floor or it’ll eat you! Her mother comes in and looks under the bed. She sees nothing and, after telling Aurora “There’s nothing under the bed but dust bunnies,” they say goodnight. Aurora says, “I know. He’ll eat you,” but they turn out the light and leave the room. Aurora takes her blanket and pillow and sleeps on the balcony, watched by the dust bunny. She sees a shooting star and says “I wish… I wish…” and a glowing spark comes down from the sky, circling her—it gets ber attention and continues down to the ground, where it circles her neighbour, then goes back up to the sky. The next morning, Aurora is watching something that appears to be a lightning bug (firefly) going into her neighbour’s mailbox in the lobby, and she watches from cover as he empties his mailbox. The firefly comes out of the box when he does so, and she watches him as he goes to his room (5B—she and herparents are in 5E). That night, her father tells her while she has her bath that he’s putting all her fears and worries in his pajama pocket, but she remains unconvinced. When her parents put her in her bed and wish her a good night, she says “Goodbye, father. Goodbye, mother.” They leave and go to their room.
Later that evening she climbs down the fire escape and follows her neighbour into Chinatown, where she sees him defeat a dragon. We can see that it’s half a dozen men operating the traditional dragon costume, but she sees a dragon. She follows him back into the building but her parent’s front door is locked so she has to knock. They let her in, asking where she’d been at that time of night. Back in bed, she pulls the covers over her head and shivers and whimpers when she hears crunching noises and scremas coming from her parents’ room
At this point, I can’t tell you a whole lot more of the plot without really spoiling it. Short version: she cleverly obtains a bit over $300 and tries to hire her neighbour to “kill the monster that ate her parents.” He scoffs and says she should stop pretending, because “grownups don’t pretend.” She scoffs right back and says “Grownups are always pretending. They pretend they’re not afraid.” She tells him she saw him kill a dragon, but he says they were men; there are no monsters. She takes him to her apartment to show him her parents are gone. He picks up something from the mess in the room—the floor is covered with feathers from pillows and the door is askew. Later, he meets Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), who tries to convince him that the parents were killed by someone trying to kill him but got the wrong apartment, and that the parents saw the team’s faces and had to go.
At this point, we’re convinced that he’s an assassin who works for Laverne, and she’s advised him that the girl has to go because she’s seen his face. Again, I can’t go very much farther with this description. Events seem to flow naturally, and we’re seeing some things from both his point of view—human assassins trying to kill Mads and the girl, and her point of view, which is that there’s a monster living under the floorboards that wants to kill and eat anyone walking on the parquet floors in the apartment.
The dual POV is very cleverly done; we witness a monster apparently diving in and out of the floor at will, but not leaving a mark; at the same time, we see human assassins coming for both Mads and the girl. About half- to three-quarters of the way through, you are assured which version is true, but I won’t divulge it here. The movie is full of symbolism (some of which I didn’t catch, but Lynne pointed out: there is Christian symbolism involving crosses and halos); at least one bloodspot on the wall looks like a rabbit, and in the Chinese Dim Sum restaurant there are dumplings that look like white rabbits. The camerawork is stellar—and the effects are both CGI and practical. The SFX are appropriate and creepily well done. The music is also appropriate; the only tune I noted was an ABBA song near the end. Sigourney gives a good performance as a bloodthirsty person who is happy to kill a child who has just seen the face of an assassin. I haven’t even mentioned the FBI agent who figues in this story—Sheila Atim as Brenda. I’m not sure whether Fuller had a hand in casting, but Atim and Dastmalchian are possibly chosen as much for their quirky—and wonderully appropriate—looks as well as their acting skills.
Fuller is obviously a writer/director to watch in future, and unlike many child actors, Sophie’s performance is not overdone. Altogether a movie and a director—and actors—to keep watching. The movie is rated “R” because there are quite a few deaths (and at least one body is cut up and packaged up in pieces, though you don’t actually see that.), so I wouldn’t call it family friendly.
NOTE: This column is in no way written, edited, proofed or composed by AI, though some of my photo editing software uses it in some capacity. This is a human column and will remain so.
I’d like to hear what you think about this column. I’m on Facebook, or you could email me (stevefah at hotmail dot com). If you liked it, let me know—if you hated it, let me know so I can do better! My opinion is, as always, my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories or its owner, editor, publisher or other columnists. See you next time!
Steve has been an active fan since the 1970s, when he founded the Palouse Empire Science Fiction Association and the more-or-less late MosCon in Pullman, WA and Moscow, ID, though he started reading SF/F in the early-to-mid 1950s, when he was just a sprat. He moved to Canada in 1985 and quickly became involved with Canadian cons, including ConText (’89 and ’81) and VCON. He’s published a couple of books and a number of short stories, and has collaborated with his two-time Aurora-winning wife Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk on a number of art projects. As of this writing he’s the proofreader for R. Graeme Cameron’s Polar Borealis and Polar Starlight publications. He’s been writing for Amazing Stories off and on since the early 1980s. His column can be found on Amazing Stories most Fridays.
