Dust Bunny Parent Guide

Like most children, Aurora (Sophie Sloan) has a monster under her bed. Unlike most children, Aurora’s monster is real, and has eaten her parents.

Luckily, her (unnamed) neighbor across the hall in 5B (Mads Mikkelsen) is a professional monster killer – at least, that’s what Aurora thinks after seeing him kill a dozen armed thugs inside a Chinese dragon during a parade. He is, in fact, a hitman.

Although the hit man doesn’t believe Aurora’s story about a monster eating her parents, he is willing to take a look around the apartment, where he finds signs of a struggle, some bullet casings, and a notable lack of blood, parents, or monsters. The most likely cause, he thinks, is that his work has followed him home, and whoever came after him got the wrong apartment. But Aurora knows better…

Dust Bunny is tantalizingly close to a PG-13 rating. I think it barely cleared enough violence to earn the “R”, but considering what the MPA lets Marvel get away with these days, that’s a pretty close call which I suspect had almost as much to do with the size of the production as it did with the level of gore. Said violence consists of a few people getting beaten up, eaten, shot, and stabbed, as well as a corpse being dismembered off-screen. Look, I’m not saying this is a kids’ flick, but it is broadly suitable for teenagers.

The movie has a real storybook feel to it, that childlike sense of an impossible fear, which is bolstered by a highly saturated and stylized visual design throughout. That’s not to say that the film is overly wordy – there’s actually remarkably little talking, since all of the characters (especially Aurora) are smart enough to figure out what’s going on without verbalizing it for the audience. It’s not hard to keep up, but it is a refreshing break from the expositional babble which has taken over screenwriting.

Good design, good writing, great pacing, and super casting make this one of the more enjoyable films of the year. Don’t let the horror label worry you – Dust Bunny isn’t particularly frightening, but it is funny, exciting, and surprisingly heartwarming. It’s well worth the price of admission.