Dust Bunny (2025) Review: An R-Rated Fairy Tale That Never Fully Commits

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Dust Bunny (2025)

Dust Bunny is directed by Bryan Fuller and the cast includes Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sheila Atim, David Dastmalchian, and Sigourney Weaver.

My Thoughts on Dust Bunny

The title Dust Bunny sounds like it belongs on a Saturday morning cartoon, but the poster made it look like it might bite you if you stared at it too long.

It opens with an eight-year-old girl who is utterly convinced that a monster under her bed has eaten her family, and I wasn't immediately sure whether this was going to be scary, funny, or sad, and apparently, neither did the movie.

This girl decides to recruit her neighbor - a man who seems just as shady as the concept of “neighbor” allows - to help her take down this alleged monster, and that’s basically the backbone of the story. 


The way it unfolds, though, isn’t that neat, as scenes drift from darkly funny moments into sequences that are more unsettling, and one minute, you’re laughing at the absurdity of a grown man crawling under a bed, and the next, the lighting and camera angles turns it into something else, and I wasn’t entirely sure what tone I was supposed to be taking seriously.

A lot of the visuals is packed with little details, some of which seem irrelevant until you notice them the third time they appear, and I liked how busy it all felt, even when I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be focusing on. 

At the same time, some of the CGI moments were rough, and certain elements were jarring enough that I couldn’t completely ignore it, which is frustrating because the physical sets are so carefully constructed that the disconnect stands out.

The performances are also interesting, where Mads Mikkelsen does his usual thing, but Sophie Sloan as the young girl is the standout here, and she’s not trying to be cute or precocious, which is refreshing, and she balances fear, curiosity, and humor in a way that makes the movie tolerable even when it’s meandering. 

Sheila Atim and David Dastmalchian are scattered throughout, each bringing eccentricities where they gave the adults around the girl some texture, and Sigourney Weaver appears for a blink-and-you-miss-it role, which felt like a cameo shoehorned in without adding anything substantial.

But, the biggest issue is that Dust Bunny struggles with its own identity - it’s rated R, but there are stretches that feel like they could be aired on daytime television, and this tonal confusion can make certain scenes feel a bit out of place. 

You get moments that are supposed to be threatening that are basically undercut by a joke that lands too softly, and a heartfelt scene might be interrupted by something ridiculous, and while I didn’t hate it,  I also couldn’t stop noticing it.

And while the tonal missteps are part of the package, I do think it would have been more effective if it committed to being one thing instead of a shifting kaleidoscope.

Dust Bunny movie still

The story itself is also occasionally baffling, and while it’s easy enough to follow, the middle sections wander through weird, magical sequences that sometimes feel like they exist solely to show off the set design or the filmmakers imagination.

Despite all this, there’s an energy to the movie that keeps it moving, and the final act ramps up in a way that felt almost necessary after the previous meandering sections, where the humor becomes more absurd, the scares more confident, and the pacing more intentional. 

If you let yourself go with it, the movie has a charm that’s hard to resist at times, where it’s messy, it’s occasionally frustrating, but it’s clearly not trying to be conventional. 

Dust Bunny feels like a house full of odd collections - some beautiful, some broken, some just plain weird -where it doesn’t fit neatly into a genre, and it doesn’t pretend to. 

I thought it was often funny, and occasionally breathtaking in its attention to detail, and while it doesn't all work for me,  I appreciated enough of it to stay engaged the whole way, which is always something, right?