Review: In 'Dust Bunny,' a girl hires an assassin to take out her bedroom terrors

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TV legend Bryan Fuller, known for his cult classics “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal,” just earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for first feature.It’s somehow a surprise that the well-known creator just directed his first movie, after spending almost three decades working in television on series like “Dead Like Me” and “American Gods.” Now he turns to the world of indie film, reuniting with actor Mads Mikkelsen, his Hannibal Lecter, on the dark fairy tale “Dust Bunny.”Fuller has a thing for idioms, extending them to their most extreme ends (e.g., “pushing daisies”), and so in “Dust Bunny,” he imagines what those bits of fluff could be if our nightmares came to life.

He also posits an outlandish notion: What if a kid hired an assassin to kill the monster under her bed?Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is an imaginative young girl who hears things that roar and scream in the night.The dust bunny under her bed is a ravenous, monstrous thing.

When her parents go missing, she’s convinced they’ve been eaten by the monster bunny, and seeks out the services of an “intriguing neighbor” (Mikkelsen, that’s how he’s credited) whom she has seen vanquishing dragons in the alley outside.With a fee that she purloins from a church collection plate, she implores him for help and he agrees, as he learns more about this young girl’s challenging childhood.

Entertainment & Arts At first, “Dust Bunny” feels a little light, the story skittering across its densely designed surface, with very little dialogue in the first half.But it grows and grows, more bits and pieces accumulating as Fuller reveals this strange, heightened world.

We meet Intriguing Neighbor’s handler, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), revealing the larger Wickian world of killers that he inhabits.Weaver chomps through her scenes like the monster bunny chomps through the floorboards — lit...