Dust Bunny

A film set in a block of flats. Aurora is eight. She says there is something under her bed. Nobody believes her. One night her family disappears. Her mother, her father and her sister. She is certain it ate them. She looks for help. There is a man in the next flat. The only place she has seen him before is the corridor. He is a contract killer. Well dressed, calm, and he takes his work seriously. Aurora knocks on his door. She makes a proposal: she wants him to kill the monster under her bed. She will pay. He refuses at first. Then he accepts. From there the film is a story of partnership. The two make a plan. He treats the child seriously, and that is the strangest thing about it; the narrative never looks down on her. At the same time he has his own business. Somebody is looking for him. An organisation, an account and a name. The narrative ties the two lines together. What the narrative is interested in is not a monster but belief: its idea is that nobody believes what the child says and that the only one who does is a killer. What is actually happening is kept unsettled to the end. Whether the monster is real or stands for something else; the narrative leaves it open. The images are heavily worked. Saturated colours, exaggerated sets, symmetrical framing. The director had worked in television and brings the visual language of that work here. There is violence and it is placed inside the fairy-tale tone. This is Bryan Fuller's first feature. He had worked with Mads Mikkelsen on a series before. The film screened at Toronto on 9 September 2025 and opened in America on 12 December 2025. It was nominated at the Independent Spirit Awards for best first feature and cinematography. Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian and Sheila Atim are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes films that mix fairy tale with horror and visually extreme production. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a coherent world; the narrative does not explain its rules and the tone keeps shifting.