‘Dust Bunny’ review: Mads Mikkelsen plays a helpful killer in a dark fantasy

television legend Brian Fullerknown for his cult classics Pushing Daisies and Hannibal, just received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his first feature film. It's kind of surprising that the acclaimed creator has just directed his first film after spending nearly three decades working in television on shows like Dead Like Me and American Gods. Now he's turning to the indie film world, reuniting with the actor. Mads Mikkelsenhis Hannibal Lecter, based on the dark tale “The Dust Bunny.”

Fuller loves idioms, taking them to extreme extremes (like “pushing daisies”), and so in The Dust Bunny he imagines what these pieces of fluff might be like if our nightmares came to life. He also comes up with an outlandish idea: what if a girl hired a killer to kill the monster under her bed?

Aurora (Sophie Sloane) is an imaginative young girl who hears things that roar and scream in the night. The dust bunny under her bed is a predatory and monstrous creature. When her parents go missing, she's convinced they've been eaten by a bunny monster and enlists the services of an “intriguing neighbor” (Mikkelsen, as he's known) whom she saw slaying dragons in the alley outside. After receiving a fee that she steals from the church collection plate, she begs him for help, and he agrees after learning more about this young girl's difficult childhood.

The Dust Bunny feels a little light at first, the story skimming across its tightly plotted surface, with very little dialogue in the first half. But it grows and grows, accumulating more and more bits and pieces as Fuller reveals this strange, sublime world. We meet the curator of The Intriguing Neighbor, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), as she uncovers the large Wickian murder world he inhabits. Weaver chews her scenes like a monster rabbit chews through floorboards—literally, as she happily devolves charcuterie, dumplings, and “suckling pig tea sandwiches.” Some monsters are grinning at us across the table.

It's essentially Léon: The Professional meets Amelie (one of Fuller's favorite films), but with his own special wit and flair. This style also means that The Dust Bunny is quite fussy and campy, and if you don't buy into the film's arch humor and stylized world, you may find yourself jumping off it immediately. As Fuller opens up the world to reveal a cunning FBI agent (Sheila Atim) and other villains (David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson), the plot becomes increasingly intriguing beyond the unwieldy metaphor of childhood trauma, but not enough is stitched into this tapestry. This seems superficial, not fleshed out.

Fuller demonstrates a strong command of his visual space, but his formulaic allegory about the monsters we must learn to live with feels a bit muddled. Sloane and Mikkelsen are stunning together, but you feel like they could have stuck a lot more into this, and perhaps the limits of the story reveal the limits of the budget, carefully wallpapered with lavish production design—explosions of pattern and color created by Jeremy Reed, captured with dark but vibrant cinematography by Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.

This is the first feature that seems like such – a small surprise from such an experienced person. But the project has Fuller's signature style, even if it's little more than a neat, kid-friendly genre exercise in Hard-R style.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for Tribune News Service.