Now on HBO Max: Bryan Fuller Is Back with a Cult-Classic-To-Be

“They don’t make ‘em like that anymore” is a thing people have been saying since a week after people first started making things. An inevitability as tastes and perspectives and technologies change—nostalgia wraps history in a warm hug, whether said history was worthy or not. And a lot does work its way up to worthy, eventually—as John Huston said in Chinatown, politicians, ugly buildings and so forth all get respectable if they last long enough.

But sometimes, sometimes they do make ‘em like they used to do. And they make ‘em sometimes even better, as the inevitable shifts in taste and perception and technology allow for a sort of leveling-up—all that good stuff remixed, the just right parts plucked and reassembled.

So sprinkles forth Bryan Fuller’s magical wonder Dust Bunny, hop hop hopping down the bunny trail and straight into our hearts. The television mastermind behind Pushing Daisies and Hannibal has, with his big-screen directorial debut, tossed everything from those generation-defining Amblin-esque 1980s kid’s adventure stories a la The Goonies to the cinema de Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Kill Bill into his cinematic melting pot, and puréed for us a future cult classic. One that generations of kids and adults alike will surely savor all their days. You should trust the man who made cannibalism look delicious when it comes to taste!

Dust Bunny tells the fairy-ish tale of eight-year-old Aurora (charm-riddled newcomer Sophie Sloan), who hides terrified beneath her eyeball-adorned blanket one morning as the titular monster under her bed goes and gobbles her parents right up, tip to toe. Oh no! Thankfully, she’s got a Plan B (her Plan A of “Don’t get gobbled” having fallen through), though. Having recently followed her nameless next door neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen, on fire) and watched him slay a Chinatown Dragon, she’s going to pay the steely assassin to assassinate her monster now, and save the day. Toot suite. (Not to mention too sweet.)

Aurora’s imagination might’ve maybe gotten just a wee bit away from her though, since what we actually saw was Mads and his samurai sword slicing up a bunch of assassins who’d hidden inside one of those long dancing dragon costumes. Lit like Blade Runner with fireworks and shadowplay a la Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 animated classic The Adventures of Prince Achmed, it’s not a mark against little Aurora that she got overwhelmed by what she was seeing—Fuller’s delicious maximalism leaps off the ledge right on early and never lets up, g’bless. We’re all flying by the seats of our pants not ten minutes in singing whatta ride.

And yet, as Fuller proved time and time and time again with his television work, for all of the clashing technicolor wallpaper patterns he never loses sight of the characters standing in contrasting shirts against it. The relationship that develops between Aurora and her super-assassin cum father-figure cum knight in matching tracksuits becomes one of utter ironclad devotion, and it should easily hook itself into the heart-meat of even the most cynical ones out there. (Speaking as a cynic I can say I resemble this remark.) It’s like Léon: The Professional but without the creepy-in-retrospect undertones. Nothing but light and love and Looney Tunes.

Anyway, you can tell these two will be a perfect match early on via one of Fuller’s most delightfully deranged inventions—why have Aurora just crack open her piggy bank to pay her next-door neighbor slash assassin when instead we can have her dress up like a church lady circa 1963 to rob a mega-church as the choir’s engaged in some Singing Nun lip-synching theatrics? If the little girl’s giant smile as she brings her blasphemous caper to fruition doesn’t immediately endear her to you then you’re far cagier and meaner than I—this is absurd joy at its purest distillation. A reason to roll out of bed in the morning, knowing you might meet up with a sequence as silly and exquisite as this.

And Dust Bunny is teeming with ‘em. Eventually, Aurora’s quest to kill that wascally wabbit drags in an entire fleet of assassins, all of them gunning for one another without realizing the real threat is sniffing at their feet from beneath the floorboards. There’s David Dastmalchian as a black-jacketed bad guy with a Matrix-flavored band of killers on one side, and Sheila Atim and her mile-high stilettos and deceptive nose-ring on the other. And let us not forget the crimeworld figurehead Laverne (no less than the legend Sigourney Weaver) lording above all the mayhem—she certainly won’t allow you to forget her, since Sigourney is clearly having the time of her life here, quite literally unhinging her jaw at one point. Swaddled in florals with a tendency for pedicide, I’ll be danged if she ain’t everything.

Still, for all the chaos and charcuterie boards and vibrating-toothbrush-murder, Fuller never lets his movie lose sight of that savory-sweet bond between Aurora and the guy who can never pronounce her name quite right. Finding common ground in between the big stuff over the eccentric paths that’ve led to their mutual isolations, there’s no monster big enough that can topple this pair. (Although it must be said that the Bunny, once fully popped out of the shadows and swallowing folks up whole, is an absolute humdinger of design-work—my kingdom for a stuffed animal, an action figure, a full-sized Halloween costume one day.) All that is to say that Dust Bunny is delight incarnate, a rascally fable of huge, fuzzy, hungry heart and teeth and soul. Jump in on this future cult while it’s still early all y’all!