'Dust Bunny' Review
- Peter Gray
- Dec 24, 2025
- 2 min read
Release Date: 12/19/25 [Cinemas]
Genre: Action. Drama. Horror. Thriller.
MPAA: Rated R.
Distributor: Roadside Attractions.
The Verdict: A Must-See
In his feature directorial debut, Bryan Fuller delivers a boldly stylised and unexpectedly tender action thriller with Dust Bunny, a film that feels less like a conventional genre exercise and more like a fever dream stitched together from myth, violence, and childhood imagination. Starring Mads Mikkelsen as a weary hitman known only as Resident 5B and newcomer Sophie Sloan as the enigmatic eight-year-old Aurora, the film occupies a strange, compelling space where brutality and wonder coexist.
Dust Bunny opens in near silence, its first act unfolding with minimal dialogue and an almost storybook patience. This choice immediately establishes the film’s heightened, otherworldly tone. Fuller leans heavily into visual storytelling, allowing glances, gestures, and carefully composed frames to do the narrative heavy lifting. It’s a risky approach, but one that pays off by pulling the audience into a world that feels both familiar and unmoored from reality — like a half-remembered nightmare.
The premise is deceptively simple. Aurora approaches Resident 5B with a request: kill the “monster” under her bed, a creature she insists devoured her family. Resident 5B, seasoned in death and suspicion, assumes the truth is more grounded. Yet Dust Bunny thrives in the tension between those interpretations. Fuller never rushes to clarify whether the monster is metaphorical, literal, or something in between, allowing the film to operate in a liminal space where fairy tale logic and assassin mythology blur.
At the film’s heart is the surprising chemistry between Mikkelsen and Sloan. Mikkelsen plays Resident 5B with his trademark restraint, projecting exhaustion and latent compassion beneath the character’s lethal competence. Sloan, meanwhile, is remarkable — her performance is unsettling, funny, and oddly commanding. Together, they form a pairing that recalls John Wick filtered through Narnia: a hardened killer navigating a child’s warped fantasy landscape.
Supporting performances enrich the film’s eccentric universe. Sigourney Weaver brings cool authority as Resident 5B’s handler, grounding the surreal narrative with sharp pragmatism. Sheila Atim and David Dastmalchian add texture to the assassin world circling the edges of the story, their characters feeling like figures out of a dark fable rather than stock genre players.
Ultimately, Dust Bunny succeeds not because it reinvents the action thriller, but because it reframes it. Fuller’s debut is dazzingly imaginative, emotionally curious, and unafraid of strangeness. It’s a film that trusts atmosphere over exposition and feeling over logic — and in doing so, delivers something haunting, playful, and quietly moving.
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