Dust Bunny (2025) Lionsgate 4K UHD Review
There Is a Monster Under the Bed. She Needs a Hitman.
Thus begins Dust Bunny. Bryan Fuller’s dazzling and imperfect feature debut arrives in a gorgeous 3.00:1 Dolby Vision presentation
Table of Contents
Thirty Years in Television, One Perfect Premise
Bryan Fuller has spent nearly thirty years as one of television’s most distinctive creative voices, producing work that is visually lavish, thematically ambitious, tonally ungovernable, and commercially uncooperative in more or less equal measure. The cult audiences who found Pushing Daisies (2007-2009), Wonderfalls (2004), and Hannibal (2013-2015) recognized in Fuller a sensibility so particular, so committed to its own aesthetic and moral obsessions, that the shows felt authored in a way that network television rarely permits. They were also cancelled with a regularity that suggested the network audience and Fuller’s aesthetic were never going to fully negotiate their differences. He began his career in the Star Trek universe on Deep Space Nine and Voyager, developed the series that established his signature voice, and eventually returned to Star Trek to create Discovery, which concluded its run in 2024. The through-line across all of that work is a commitment to visual beauty that his budgets could not always support and a thematic interest in death, grief, and the ways people construct meaning around loss that his audience could not always follow. Feature film, with its contained budget obligations and its demands for narrative compression, turns out to suit his sensibility considerably better than television’s appetite for expansion.
Dust Bunny is Fuller’s feature film directorial debut, and the premise he chose for this transition is one of the more audacious distillations of a filmmaker’s preoccupations into a single logline. Eight-year-old Aurora has a monster under her bed. Her neighbor across the hall is a professional assassin. She hires him to kill the monster. Roger Ebert’s review compared the setup to The Professional (1994) directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, which is an accurate shorthand for the tonal territory Fuller is occupying, and the closing credits confirm his own awareness of the lineage by announcing the film as “Un Film de Bryan Fuller” in explicit homage to the French New Wave auteur tradition that Jeunet’s work inhabits.
The film premiered in the Midnight Madness program at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2025, received a theatrical release in the United States on December 12, 2025, and earned approximately $904,000 worldwide against a production that was financed independently through eOne Films and Thunder Road Pictures. Those numbers describe the commercial reality of an original, visually ambitious, tonally unusual R-rated fantasy in the current theatrical landscape with startling precision: this is exactly what happens when you make a film that could not be anything other than itself, and it is also exactly why home video releases like this Lionsgate 4K UHD matter so much for films that the theatrical window could not adequately platform.
Lionsgate’s 4K UHD release, available now at an MSRP of $26.99, presents Dust Bunny in a 2160p Dolby Vision presentation at the film’s native 3.00:1 ultra-wide aspect ratio, and the disc is a demonstration of what Dolby Vision can do for a film that was built from the first frame for exactly this kind of home presentation. Head to your preferred physical media retailer and pick this one up. This is not a film that should be a streaming footnote. It deserves to be owned, rewatched, and argued about.
A Child’s Logic, Applied to Monster Hunting
Aurora, played by Sophie Sloan in her feature film debut, is eight years old and has been through four families. She is a foster child with the specific quality of self-reliance and observational acuity that children develop when the adult world has repeatedly failed to keep its promises to them. She has a monster under her bed. The monster is real. It is a large, vicious, gap-toothed rabbit creature that will consume anything that touches the floor around her, and it has already eaten her parents and two previous sets of foster parents. Aurora tells the adults in her life about the monster. They respond with the practiced patience of adults explaining away impossible things. The monster continues to eat people.
The solution Aurora arrives at is entirely logical within her system of understanding: she has witnessed her neighbor in apartment 5B kill what she interpreted as a dragon in Chinatown, which was in fact an armed gang concealed inside a dragon dance puppet. Her neighbor is a professional killer. She needs a professional killer. She will hire him.
The negotiation scene between Aurora and Resident 5B, as Mads Mikkelsen is credited, is the best scene in the film and one of the finest scenes in any 2025 release. Aurora makes her pitch with the unsettling seriousness of a child who has had to become a competent adult before she was ready. Resident 5B responds with the specific discomfort of a man who has done terrible things for money and finds that a child’s uncomplicated request to do a terrible thing for money is somehow harder to process than any of his previous contracts. The transaction they arrive at, paid for by collection plate money Aurora has relieved from a church, has the moral logic of a fairy tale: the currency is not the point, the commitment is. The running gag that follows them through the film, in which Mikkelsen’s Danish accent causes him to mispronounce “Aurora” in different ways and she corrects him with diminishing patience, has the quality of something discovered in performance rather than scripted, and it earns its emotional payoff in the film’s final moments more fully than many more laboriously constructed character beats in more conventionally polished films.
The narrative that surrounds this central relationship is where Dust Bunny accumulates its problems. Laverne, played by Sigourney Weaver with a scene-stealing charisma and a pair of heels that qualify as lethal weapons, is Resident 5B’s handler and the film’s most energetically performed character. Her decision to send assassins after Aurora rather than let her live as a witness complicates the plot in ways that multiply the film’s action sequences without proportionally deepening its dramatic stakes. Sheila Atim as FBI agent Brenda and David Dastmalchian as a pursuer styled as the Conspicuously Inconspicuous Man contribute to a supporting ensemble that is individually excellent and collectively more than the film’s narrative architecture can efficiently accommodate.
The monster’s metaphorical dimension is clear and deliberate and occasionally overdetermined. It represents the trauma that follows Aurora from family to family, the sense that danger lurks beneath the surfaces of all the places she tries to call home. Fuller is astute enough to let this reading coexist with the monster’s literal reality rather than insisting on a single interpretive framework, and the film’s refusal to definitively privilege either the fairy tale or the psychological reading is one of its most interesting formal qualities. It is also a quality that the second half manages less consistently than the first, as the plot obligations of the assassin thriller structure increasingly demand the film’s attention at the expense of the character work that made its first hour so distinctive.
Fuller, Jeunet, and the Influences That Live in the Frame
It would be inaccurate to call the visual aesthetic of Dust Bunny original, and Fuller’s closing credit acknowledges the debt rather than disguising it. What is original is the specific combination of references and the conviction with which Fuller commits to the synthesis. The Jeunet-Caro influence, which encompasses Delicatessen (1991), The City of Lost Children (1995), and Amélie (2001), is the most structurally significant: the world-as-fairy-tale visual logic, the heightened color palette, the camera that lunges and tilts with a restlessness that matches the characters’ subjective experience of their environment. The Tim Burton influence is present in the candy-dark production design and in the fondness for characters who are simultaneously grotesque and sympathetic. The Guillermo del Toro influence is visible in the monster’s design and in the film’s commitment to taking its creature seriously as a physical presence with weight and appetite rather than as a metaphorical prop.
Cinematographer Nicole Hirsch Whitaker was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography for her work on Dust Bunny, and the nomination is entirely merited. The film was shot largely on location in Budapest, using the Art Nouveau buildings designed by architect Ödön Lechner, whose organic, biomorphic facades and decorative surfaces give the production design by Jeremy Reed an architectural grounding that a studio environment could not have manufactured. When Dust Bunny’s world looks fantastical, it is because it is built from a city that already looks fantastical, and Whitaker’s camera engages with those surfaces with a tactile appreciation that communicates how much the visual world of the film was conceived in terms of actual physical places rather than constructed dreamscapes.
The color palette ranges from chilly steely blues through hot golds and reds, and the transitions between these registers track the film’s emotional logic. The apartment building, Aurora’s space of domestic danger and tentative safety, operates in cooler tones. The external world, where Resident 5B operates and where his professional life intersects with Aurora’s private crisis, runs warmer and more dangerous. The monster sequences, when the creature is actively hunting, push the palette toward something more saturated and more menacing. This is sophisticated cinematographic storytelling, and the 4K Dolby Vision presentation delivers it with the precision it requires.
Isabella Summers, best known for her work with Florence and the Machine, composed the score, and it is one of the more unexpected musical choices for this type of material: orchestrally rich but with electronic textures that give the monster sequences an alien, unsettling quality distinct from conventional horror underscore. The music Fuller has assembled around the film includes a church sequence early in the film that generates one of the release’s most memorable passages: nuns performing an elaborate musical number that operates simultaneously as comedy, spectacle, and character exposition.
Mikkelsen and Sloan: The Pairing the Film Depends On
Dust Bunny works, when it works, because of what happens between Mads Mikkelsen and Sophie Sloan. This is the film’s fundamental insight, and Fuller trusts it more consistently in the first hour than in the second, but even when the plot mechanics are fragmenting the film’s attention, the moments these two actors share carry a weight that the surrounding architecture cannot entirely dissipate.
Mikkelsen has built his post-Hannibal career on a particular kind of role: men of extreme professional competence who carry, beneath that competence, a quality of interior life that the competence simultaneously expresses and conceals. Resident 5B is a version of that archetype, and Mikkelsen plays him with the economy of gesture and expression that has become his signature. His performance is fundamentally reactive: he watches Aurora, processes her with increasing unease and eventual capitulation to something that resembles protectiveness, and his interior journey is communicated almost entirely through what his stillness contains rather than through explicit emotional declaration. The scene where he first accepts the contract, looking at this eight-year-old with her collection plate money and her absolute seriousness about the monster under her bed, is a masterclass in the kind of acting that looks effortless and is anything but. When he finally does something explicitly kind, it lands with the force of a character action that has been prepared through two hours of careful restraint.
Sophie Sloan is the film’s revelatory performance, and the superlatives that critics applied to her work at TIFF and on the film’s theatrical release are not exaggerated. She spent five months perfecting an American accent, working with Danish actress Line Kruse who was also her acting coach during production, and the accent never once slips. The work is invisible in the best sense, leaving the performance free to inhabit the character rather than the craft. What Sloan gives Aurora is an unwavering seriousness about the things Aurora takes seriously, including the monster, including the contract negotiation, including the friendship that develops between Aurora and Resident 5B, that grounds the film’s stranger elements in something emotionally true. The RT consensus accurately identifies the Mikkelsen-Sloan pairing as the film’s central asset, describing their “magnetic chemistry” as the thing that elevates Dust Bunny above its structural wobbles.
Weaver’s Laverne deserves specific mention as the film’s most purely entertaining performance. She plays the character as if Laverne has seen everything and found most of it contemptible, dispensing dry wit alongside lethal instructions with the practiced efficiency of a professional who has long since stopped distinguishing between them. Her scenes with Mikkelsen carry the specific tension of two people who know exactly what each of them is capable of and are gauging the gap between capability and current intent with careful attention. Her high-heel weaponry is one of the film’s most extravagant physical gags, and Weaver lands it with the complete deadpan commitment that makes the difference between an effective bit and a brilliant one.
Film and Disc Specifications
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Film Title | Dust Bunny |
| Year | 2025 |
| Director | Bryan Fuller |
| Written, Produced, and Directed by | Bryan Fuller |
| Produced by | Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, Bryan Fuller |
| Cast | Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sheila Atim, David Dastmalchian, Sigourney Weaver, Rebecca Henderson, Line Kruse |
| Cinematography | Nicole Hirsch Whitaker |
| Music | Isabella Summers |
| Production Designer | Jeremy Reed |
| Production Companies | eOne Films / Thunder Road Pictures / Living Dead Guy Productions |
| US Distributor | Lionsgate / Roadside Attractions |
| Theatrical Release | September 9, 2025 (TIFF Midnight Madness); December 12, 2025 (US) |
| Runtime | 106 minutes |
| Rating | R |
| Awards | Independent Spirit Award nominations: Best First Feature, Best Cinematography |
| Rotten Tomatoes | 85% Certified Fresh |
| Metacritic | 73 |
| Color | Color |
| Disc Format | Single-disc 4K UHD + Digital Copy |
| Aspect Ratio | 3.00:1 |
| Video | 2160p 4K UHD, Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) |
| Audio | English Dolby Atmos |
| Subtitles | English SDH, Spanish |
| MSRP | $26.99 |
| Release Date | April 28, 2026 |
| Distributor | Lionsgate |
Special Features:
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Making Dust Bunny | Main behind-the-scenes featurette (most substantial supplement) |
| Monster Craft | Brief piece on creature design |
| Q&A Sizzle | Snippets of Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen interview |
| Cute to Cutthroat | Cast members on the monster |
| Cast Explainers | Brief cast commentary on the film |
| Mads Choreography Video | Split-screen action breakdown |
| Theatrical Trailer | Original |
A Vivid World in Ultra-Wide Dolby Vision: Video Quality
Dust Bunny presents one of the more striking visual packages that a recent Lionsgate release has offered, and the 3.00:1 aspect ratio is the first and most immediately distinctive thing about this disc. The ultra-wide frame is not an affectation. Fuller and Whitaker designed the visual grammar of the film around the extreme horizontal space, using the width to place characters in environments that dwarf them, to stage the monster sequences with a spatial dread that a more conventional frame could not achieve, and to let the Art Nouveau architecture of the Budapest locations fill the screen with a decorative density that rewards the attention the 3.00:1 format demands. Multiple reviewers noted that this is one of the more distinctive visual movie-watching experiences of recent releases, and the Dolby Vision presentation does it complete justice.
The color work is where the disc most visibly earns its premium. Whitaker’s palette ranges from chilly steely blues to hot-running golds and reds, and the Dolby Vision grade handles both ends of this range with precision. The darker sequences in the apartment building, where Aurora’s domestic world operates in cool shadow, have genuine depth and shadow complexity. The Chinatown sequence, the church musical number, and the climactic monster confrontations all push the color to a more saturated register, and the Dolby Vision encoding maintains the distinction between registers rather than homogenizing them. The creature design benefits significantly from the HDR work: the monster’s textural specificity, the specifics of its tooth and fur and the particular quality of its movement, are rendered with a physical weight that makes the creature’s appearances genuinely alarming in a way that a compressed streaming presentation could not replicate.
The High Def Digest review noted that the video presentation is “oddly subdued” in some passages, which reflects the front-heavy design philosophy rather than a technical limitation. Some of the film’s quieter indoor sequences, which Fuller and Whitaker have deliberately kept at a lower visual pitch so that the monster’s intrusions hit harder, will not demonstrate the full dynamic range of the Dolby Vision grade. The disc is accurately representing the film’s aesthetic choices, not underperforming its technical capacity.
The Floor Is Lava: Audio Quality
The Dolby Atmos track for Dust Bunny is designed with the same logic as the visual presentation: restrained in the quieter passages, expansive in the moments that earn the expansion. The front-heavy design that reviewers noted is a deliberate dramatic choice, creating a baseline of normalcy that the monster sequences violate. When the creature is active and the Atmos mix opens up, effects circle and ping the height channels and rears in ways that communicate the monster’s spatial unpredictability, its ability to emerge from any direction the floor offers. The church musical sequence uses the soundfield to position the nuns’ performance with a theatrical dimensionality that makes it one of the disc’s most demonstrative audio passages.
Dialogue is consistently clear and well-integrated, which matters enormously for a film that depends so heavily on the Mikkelsen-Sloan dynamic. Isabella Summers’s score occupies the mix with appropriate presence, and the needle-drop moments on the soundtrack have the spatial warmth that Atmos surround can provide when applied with genuine attention to placement. English SDH and Spanish subtitles are included.
From the Vaults: Special Features
The supplements package for Dust Bunny is thin in quantity and variable in depth. “Making Dust Bunny” is the disc’s primary supplement, running as a conventional electronic press kit with interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and film clips. It covers Fuller’s conception of the project, Whitaker’s cinematographic approach, the creature design, and the central casting choices, and while it does not reach the depth that a commentary track or a dedicated documentary would provide, it delivers a functional account of the film’s production for viewers who want contextual access to the creative process.
The remaining featurettes are very short, several running under a minute. “Monster Craft” is an affectionate piece on the creature design that hints at more interesting content than its runtime allows. “Mads Choreography Video” uses split-screen to deconstruct one of the film’s action sequences, which is a format that the physical media format is well-suited to and which more discs should include. “Q&A Sizzle” gives brief access to Fuller and Mikkelsen at one of the film’s promotional events. “Cast Explainers” and “Cute to Cutthroat” are promotional material rather than substantive supplements.
The supplements package reflects the film’s modest theatrical presence and the limited marketing infrastructure that surrounded its release. A film with more box office momentum would likely have generated more contextual material. What is here communicates that the production was made with genuine creative intention without fully documenting that intention for the interested viewer.
Dust Bunny Is Available Now from Lionsgate
Dust Bunny is an imperfect film made with complete conviction, and the distinction between those two qualities is the most important thing to understand about it. Fuller’s structural wobbles in the second half are real. The film is probably fifteen minutes longer than its narrative can fully justify. The ensemble of supporting characters is individually compelling and collectively more than the film’s architecture efficiently accommodates. These are honest critical assessments of a film that is also dazzlingly imaginative, visually extraordinary, anchored by two of the best performances of their respective years in Mikkelsen and Sloan, and entirely unlike anything else in its release year. In a theatrical landscape of franchise sequels and IP adaptations, Dust Bunny exists as a demonstration that original filmmaking with a genuine visual intelligence can still find distribution and a home video platform.
The film’s 85% Rotten Tomatoes score and Metacritic rating of 73 indicate a critical reception that accurately identified both the film’s achievements and its limitations, and the Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best First Feature and Best Cinematography represent exactly the kind of institutional recognition that Dust Bunny deserves: acknowledgment of a genuinely original debut from a filmmaker who brought complete visual and tonal conviction to a premise that lesser execution would have made precious or incoherent. Fuller passed both tests.
The Lionsgate 4K UHD delivers a Dolby Vision presentation that justifies both the format and the ultra-wide frame Fuller designed. The supplements are modest but not negligible. The disc is available now at an MSRP of $26.99, which makes it one of the more fairly priced 4K releases of the season. If Dust Bunny was already on your list, this is the version to own. If it has not crossed your radar yet, let this disc be the gateway horror film that a scared-but-curious viewer of any age deserves.
Dust Bunny (Lionsgate) | Rated R | 106 minutes | Released April 28, 2026
