The Poppies of Terra #70 - Fuller's Hat Trick

Bryan Fuller’s (Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, American Gods, etc.) film debut is a remarkably striking hat trick. He pulls not just a rabbit, but a bunny coalesced from equal parts poignant fairy dust and blackly funny neo-noir thriller, out of the story sombrero.

In Dust Bunny, recently nominated for Film Independent Spirit Awards in the Best First Feature and Cinematography categories, Aurora (Sophie Sloan) fears the monster under her bed. She knows that her parents, while well-intentioned, are ill-equipped to handle the problem. Using her Harriet the Spy-ish skills, she observes that the neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) across the hall kills monsters. The early sequences establishing this discovery, mostly dialogue-free, rely on confidently crisp visual storytelling to cue us in. When the troubles at Aurora’s home escalate, she does the next logical thing–steals money from church donations and makes a bid to procure the hit man’s services. Before you can say “wabbit,” she and her neighbor are drawn into a web of intrigue involving monsters both human and not. More than one will bite the dust.

Fuller, who not only directed but also wrote Dust Bunny, opens his picture with a fragment of fluff descending from the sky and entering Aurora’s room. There the lint joins up with other bits of fuzz and assembles into a literalized dust bunny. As we’ll soon see, Aurora’s monster doesn’t live directly beneath her bed, but under the floorboards below her bed. So, in a sense, Aurora is a bridge connecting the realms of the heavens and the underworld. We all carry the potential for divinity and destruction within us.

And while the movie eventually reveals the particular circumstances that birthed Aurora’s monster, I’d like to think that dust bunnies, which arise at the intersection of air currents, uneven geometries, and existential neglect are fundamentally aleatoric. They come into being when we’re not looking and colonize places we couldn’t have predicted. Aurora’s very real woes have a reason d’etre, but Fuller’s exquisitely realized vision also suggests a raison d’errance. The narrative, which agilely bounds across genres to give us tonal zoomies, binkies and stotting, effectively universalizes Aurora’s particular troubles. 

On a technical level the film is a marvel. Sloan’s performance is pitch perfect, and she and the redoubtable Mikkelsen exude a grudgingly tender chemistry. A scene early on in which he boards the building elevator before her, waits a beat, and then prevents the doors from closing so she can hop on, micro-cosmically foreshadows their entire dynamic. Meanwhile, Sigourney Weaver memorably channels a postmodern femme fatale boss with idiosyncratic tendencies, in the vein of some of her more recent roles like those in Master Gardener and The Gorge. The supporting cast, eclectically plucked, likewise delivers perfectly.

While there’s a Matilda-esque element in the movie’s backstory, and a Léon: The Professional-like elaboration of its plot, the films that Dust Bunny most evokes for me are A Monster Calls and Cobweb, both of which share Dust Bunny’s cathartic authenticity. But Fuller’s creative team leans so artfully into a particular fictional slant that his work manages to rotate our entire canvas of reality in a way that eludes those other movies. Aurora’s unreliability as a narrator is directly proportional to her dependability as a North star of feelings. She is true to herself, and thus we are irresistibly pulled into the tumble of her experiences which, we hope, will culminate in a dawning of understanding, as suggested by her name.

Cinematographer Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, appositely deploying split diopter shots and iris wipes, paints each space with stylized gusto, while Isabella Summers’ score chameleonically keeps pace with a screenplay that very much marches to its own drum. Jeremy Reed’s production design, informed by Fuller’s affinity for French maximalism, and rendered through elements like Chinoiserie wallpaper and baroquely ornate fixtures, is arrestingly meticulous without being fussy. Works by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, along with Jeunet’s Amélie, may be good mental points of reference for the film’s carefully orchestrated visual density, though there’s also a more unadorned strain of whimsical fabulism similar to early Lasse Hallström. Peter Greenaway’s combination of boisterous scenography and exacting design aesthetics also come to mind. But Fuller has a distinctly American queer touch that shoots all those hues through with a rainbow all his own.

Remarkable is also the movie’s ultra-widescreen perspective. While filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos have recently leaned into verticality (Bugonia, for instance, is in a 1.50:1, or 3:2, format), Fuller here capitalizes on a 3:1 aspect ratio. This horizontal triumphalism brings the world closer to Aurora's height, and turns the screen into a landscape that mimics the elongated reality of Aurora’s mattress, placing us right alongside her as she repeatedly seeks survival and liberation.

The movie’s dialogue flirts with absurdism because it loves honesty. The works of playwright Christopher Durang (with whom Weaver has a storied collaborative history) share a certain farcical kinship with Fuller’s. Perhaps Durang’s Baby with the Bathwater is the most relevant here, as it mirrors Aurora’s belief in a family-eating monster with a child’s distorted lens on parental neglect and loss. Both use absurd adult figures (nannies/a hitman) as flawed “saviors,” and Durang's bath as a site of near-death echoes the bed as a horror portal, while in both works humor masks deep emotional abandonment. Is the firefly that seems to follow Mikkelsen’s character in the introduction a fairy lantern, or, like a shooting star, simply part of Aurora’s wish-making weave? Fuller’s screenplay is rich with ideas, but it's their unstated implications, rather than what is said outright, that breed like rabbits in the mind long after watching. 

Food, from Pushing Daisies’ magical pies to Hannibal’s elaborate, cannibalistic gourmet spreads, tends to serve as a bridge between the corporeal and the transcendent in Fuller’s oeuvre. Here too there are not only several scenes of shared meals (you’ll remember the dim sum, trust me) where food is more than sustenance, but we also have Aurora’s claims that her monster is devouring people. Hannibal extensively explored consumption as intimacy and transformation, but I wonder if there’s another element at work as well. Given Fuller’s penchant for Catholic imagery–again, see Hannibal–we can ask if he might be ironically inverting transubstantiation. Typically, this describes how bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ while retaining their outward appearance: the substance changes while the accidents remain. Here, rather than the faithful consuming the divine and being transformed by it, the impossible or divine Dust Bunny systematically consumes the faithless, leading to a transformation, shall we say, of its maker.

Hiding the true extent of its transgressiveness in plain sight may be one of the most transgressive achievements of Fuller’s perennially charming work. Every frame of his cunicularly swift and playful first feature bears his artisanal authorship.

From pastels to provocations, from candied comforts to shrewd cautions about emotional dysregulation, from melancholy man-eating to malignant mourning, from pushing daisies to boundaries, he’s exactly the kind of voice that contemporary cinema needs. Please, sir, I want some more.