Fabulous. So, so good!
Here's the plot: An eight-year-old girl ropes her sketchy neighbor into helping her kill the monster under her bed—the one she’s convinced ate her whole family.
Tonally, it's Léon: The Professional (Luc Besson) + John Wick + Blade Runner 2049 + Copenhagen Cowboy (Nicolas Winding Refn) meets Amélie, but also has that Pan’s Labyrinth 'child navigating a maybe-real, maybe-not fairytale' sorta energy. There’s some Coraline in here too (that eerie, candy-colored, storybook creepiness where everything feels slightly off, but in a fun way).
There’s also a dash of Wes Anderson (his pastel, patisserie-box aesthetic, the 'charming but unsettling' dollhouse-on-the-edge-of-chaos vibe), where everything is super stylish and perhaps a little too perfect to be safe.
It also reminds me of Big Fish (dreamy, melancholic whimsy) and Edward Scissorhands (suburban fairytale-meets-macabre playfulness).
Sophie Sloan (as Aurora) and Mads Mikkelsen have adorable chemistry. Sloan beat out 9,000 other auditioners for the role, and she absolutely sticks the landing. Eccentric child characters can so easily tip into cloying or annoying territory (think Willy Wonka), but Aurora isn’t that at all—she’s genuinely fun to follow. (At one point she’s cruising around her penthouse on a rhinoceros with wheels, poling along like some teensy Venetian gondolier... and it’s delightful.)
Dust Bunny is quirky, moody, stylish, confectionary, slightly bonkers, and somehow adorable all at the same time. I know it sounds bizarro (which it is!), but it works. It really, really does.
The only hitch in the whole darn system is that—in their infinite wisdom—MPA gives Dust Bunny an R-rating. Why? Because the bed monster may or may not have eaten a couple folks, and apparently such 'thematic darkness' bumps it from PG-13 to R, but what a crock! It's a children's movie, plain and simple, so as long as your kiddos are, say, 9 and up, I'd say give it a shot, but maybe that's just Cool Dad wishful thinking? You're the parent, so you decide.
Here's another way to process it, if helpful to your mind's eye: The actual dust bunny resembles some hybrid between Sesame Street’s Mr. Snuffleupagus and The Muppet Show’s Sweetums—huge and shaggy, but with teeth less like those of a bunny wabbit and more like those of Jaws ;-)
When he gets hungry, he's REALLY hungry, but to my eye, it's always in a floppy sorta way.
