There’s a long history of films in which a vivid world of monsters and fantastical creatures turns out to be the fantasy of a traumatized child using imagination to escape from a hard reality. “The Wizard of Oz” is a prime example, if you buy the “it was all a dream” angle, and Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a particularly vivid latter-day descendant.
And then there’s “Dust Bunny,” Bryan Fuller’s fantasy that premiered in the wee hours of Tuesday morning in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival. The film follows a young girl who insists that a monster under her floorboards has eaten several sets of her stepparents, and you can certainly see it as another child’s escape into fantasy because that’s easier to deal with than reality.
But to his credit, Fuller really wants to have his cake and eat it, too – so while you’re welcome to interpret “Dust Bunny” as a troubled child’s fantasy, it’s just too much fun to buy little Aurora’s story and embrace the monstrosity of it all.
Wildly colorful, gloriously spooky and just plain nuts, this is a movie in which the audience will want to take a quote from one of the characters – “The happiest I’ve ever been is believing something impossible” – and adopt it as their new motto.
Aurora, played by the irresistible Sophie Sloan, is a no-nonsense, delightfully hard-boiled 8-year-old who knows the facts of life: There’s a monster under her floorboards who has eaten her parents more than once; if you want to live, you have to get around the house without touching the floor; and the neighbor down the hall in her impossibly ornate apartment building (think Tim Burton meets Wes Anderson) might be a guy who can hunt down that monster.
That neighbor is played by Mads Mikkelsen, who insists that he doesn’t believe the whole monster story or consider himself an assassin for hire. But he does have a particular set of skills, and he is mixed up with some unsavory characters, not the least of them being Sigourney Weaver’s zestfully evil Laverne. Plus, he seems to feel guilty over the deaths of Aurora’s latest folks. So when she offers him $327.42 – which she acquired, she tells him without an ounce of shame, by robbing the collection plate at church – he takes the job of at least being her protector.
The feature directorial debut of Fuller after a career best known for the TV series “Hannibal,” “Pushing Daisies” and “American Gods,” “Dust Bunny” takes place in a world of magic and evil that lies just beneath the surface of a more mundane reality. On the streets outside, dragon parades seem to morph into real dragons, while inside, through all those rounded, tinted and etched windows, pulling the covers over your head will keep the monsters away but won’t stop the thumps, groans and screams.
Designed as a horror movie for the entire family, the film has its scares, but it’s just too wacky and too much fun to be disturbing. With a bold musical score by Isabella Summers that keeps circling back to the liturgical doom of the “Dies Irae,” it’s macabre but wacky, though it doesn’t shrink from some dark issues and moral dilemmas. When the neighbor asks, “What makes you so tasty, Aurora?” she has a succinct but sad answer: “I’m wicked. It knows I’m wicked. It keeps eating my family because it knows I don’t deserve one.”
And she can’t be argued out of that or any other stance. A wonderfully to-the-point heroine, she responds to the neighbor’s insistence that “monsters aren’t real” with a simple declaration: “Yes, they are. Don’t pretend.”
By the end, nobody can pretend, because the film’s climactic siege involves at least half a dozen bad guys facing off against Aurora, the neighbor, an FBI agent posing as a child services worker and maybe even Aurora’s monster, who turns out to be pretty helpful in a fight.
Does it make sense? Not really. Do you want it to make sense? Hell, no. Is it all just a dream? No way.
Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions will release “Dust Bunny” in theaters on Dec. 5.