Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen are at their best on the big screen

After decades of creating masterful television with Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and the forever yearned-for Hannibal, it was only a matter of time before Bryan Fuller took his ideas from the TV screen to the silver screen. Fuller’s previous work is prestigious for a reason: He’s able to delight and horrify his audience in equal measure, often by shining a light on our desires and fears, warping them into something fantastical that still feels too close for comfort. So it’s no surprise that his feature directorial debut, Dust Bunny, successfully channels that same sentiment with the glee of Hannibal Lecter feeding a man his own leg.

The story begins in a New York City apartment building, where 8-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) hires her assassin neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen in a much-hyped Hannibal reunion) to kill the monster living underneath her bed. As expected, the hitman (labeled “Intriguing Neighbor” in the credits) isn’t too enthused by the assignment, and doesn’t believe Aurora’s tall tales. He has bigger problems of his own to deal with: his job has put a big target on his back.

Image: Roadside Attractions

The clash of the mundane and the fantastic is what Fuller does best — and just like in Pushing Daisies and Hannibal, he makes that dissonance feel stylish here. Watching Mikkelsen walk down a dirty alleyway with blue, red, and green fireworks lighting up the sky like a mosaic, or an assassin concealing himself within the flowery grey wallpaper of Aurora’s apartment, Fuller’s fans will see his fingerprints etched everywhere.

The biggest tell is the food. Hannibal fans know Fuller loves to make food look like art — before underscoring it with something disturbing. He does so again in Dust Bunny. At one point, Mikkelsen’s assassin and Aurora dig into a rabbit-shaped dumpling with eyes made of seaweed. However, when the hitman bites into it, it wriggles as if it’s alive. In another scene, Mikkelsen is offered a sandwich that looks like an ordinary sandwich, but from another angle, it resembles ribbons of flesh curled together. It’s a blink-and-miss-it moment, but it’s so visually distinct you’ll have it seared onto the back of your eyelids all the same.

Fuller has said that his goal was to make a “children’s movie that people would enjoy watching with their kids.” It’s a shame, then, that this movie got an R rating — a classification that feels unwarranted, considering the lack of blood, profanity, and gore. Dust Bunny feels exactly like a horror fairy tale ripped straight from a Brothers Grimm book.

Mads Mikkelsen and Sophie Sloan in Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny. Sloan wears a tiger-striped shirt and shorts, while Mikkelsen wears a finely decorated shirt and pants. A bright light shines from the alleyway behind them.

Even the characters’ names reflect those fairy-tale elements. Aurora shares the name of the protagonist in Disney’s 1959 film Sleeping Beauty, and most of the other characters have signifiers rather than names. For example, David Dastmalchian’s and Rebecca Henderson’s characters are known only as Conspiciously Inconspicious Man and Intimidating Woman. Through Aurora’s eyes, we see these characters as caricatures rather than people. This broadness makes them feel foreboding and ominous, revealing how Aurora sees the adult world’s tangible but barely understood threats. However, they’re still less threatening than the terrifying monster under her bed.

But while Dust Bunny scales down the gore and guts one might expect from Fuller, who used so much fake blood on Hannibal that mold started to grow on the set, Fuller hasn’t softened his razor-sharp edges, either. He likes to twist audience expectations, and while his script very much leans into kid horror, Dust Bunny makes an incredibly mundane thing — a literal dust bunny under Aurora’s bed — feel like a loaded gun.

But the biggest subversion comes from the relationship between Mikkelsen’s hitman and Aurora. Mikkelsen is well-known for playing villains, including Hannibal Lecter in Fuller’s Hannibal series. But where his Lecter is a calculating predator whose belief in the wonderful and the insane leads him to places no person would go without a gun, Dust Bunny’s hitman is a different beast. He’s gruff and lethal, but with a soft, quirky side. He defines himself as a monster, but Aurora reflects his own childlike fears and innocence. There’s a loneliness to him, a sense of neglect, that at times makes it seem like precocious, no-nonsense Aurora is the parent in their relationship. It’s the right amount of sweet and discomforting.

An image from Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny. Mads Mikkelsen wears a yellow tracksuit and leans against an elevator.

Dust Bunny may not completely scratch the unhinged itch that Fuller’s previous kaleidoscope of horror and comedy projects gave, largely because it’s so much more kid-friendly. Despite the R rating, Fuller’s vision for Dust Bunny is for kids who feel like the outsider. Dust Bunny speaks to your inner child, while also being a not-so-gentle reminder that your fears are only as strong as you make them out to be. It’s a visually and thematically distinct horror fairytale, and one that fans of Fuller will love.

Dust Bunny debuted in theaters on Dec. 12.