Bryan Fuller’s directorial debut, Dust Bunny, starring Mads Mikkelsen and Sophie Sloan in the leading roles, is somewhere between a fairytale and a nightmare unfolding in a Tim Burton/Wes Anderson-esque world. A young girl, Aurora, tries to convince her parents that there is a monster under her bed. Her parents, as you’d expect, assume that it is Aurora’s vivid imagination speaking, and they advise her to try to sleep. Aurora is not ready to accept that her fears are rooted in something that didn’t even exist. She is confident that it is not her imagination; there is a monster under her bed! And every day it rumbles, tumbles, screeches, and ripples from under the wooden floor, and Aurora covers her head to escape from her reality. The little girl panics when her parents disappear one morning. She is confident that the monster got them the previous night, and she comes to the conclusion that unless someone kills the monster, it will one day eat her too. Now, Aurora figures that she is too young to become a monster slayer, but her neighbor is just the right fit!
Spoiler Alert
Why did the ‘Intriguing Neighbor’ sympathize with Aurora?
Aurora had been keeping an eye on her neighbor, a disgruntled middle-aged man with a secret life that involved sneaking out of his apartment late at night, ending up in Chinatown, and slaying dragons! Well, the ‘Intriguing Neighbor’ had a different, albeit boring, adult version of what had actually happened in Chinatown. The film refrains from explaining what the Intriguing Neighbor’s job was, but presumably, he was an assassin. In Chinatown, he’d crossed paths with the wrong people, and he had to get rid of monsters who, according to him, were ‘men,’ but Aurora refused to believe his version of events. His story wasn’t heroic; it was rather grim, and she needed to believe she was in the company of a dragon slayer who would also manage to slay the monster under her bed. She’d stolen money from the church to ‘procure his services,’ but the Intriguing Neighbor, just like her parents, didn’t believe her monster story. He was convinced that her parents didn’t disappear; they were killed. He’d even found a bullet casing lying on the floor of the parents’ bedroom, but Aurora refused to listen to him. According to the Intriguing Neighbor’s theory, the men who likely killed her parents had gotten the wrong apartment. He was meant to be murdered, but as luck would have it, the assassins broke into Aurora’s home, and perhaps when her parents tried to defend themselves, they were killed and their bodies carefully disposed of. Eaten up or shot, either way, her parents were dead, but Aurora didn’t seem too emotional. It was almost like a piece of information that she’d come to accept, and all she cared about was dealing with the monster under her bed.
The Intriguing Neighbor’s handler wasn’t happy about his friendship with the little girl. Aurora had seen his face; that was reason enough for her to want to get rid of the child. She’d sent two assassins to the apartment, and while the neighbor killed one, according to the Aurora, the monster got the other. The little girl fell asleep to the sound of him chopping the assassin’s body, and she had a smile on her face when her Intriguing Neighbor asked her to help him wrap up the body parts into little parcels. Surprisingly, she wasn’t revolted at all; it was rather a bonding exercise for her.
The Intriguing Neighbor had taken a liking to the young girl; it was almost as if there was a strange connection between them. He soon discovered that Aurora’s parents were her third foster family. For some reason, it appeared that she didn’t really fit in with any family, and Brenda from Social Services had come to check on her. While Intriguing Neighbor managed to postpone Brenda’s appointment with the family, he was shocked to learn that her previous two foster families were also eaten by the monster under her bed. Apparently, Aurora had prayed for the monster to a shooting star, and that was how it came to be. She wanted the monster to eat her parents because they ‘weren’t nice’ to her. We don’t get to find out the degree of ‘not being nice,’ but it was impactful enough for a little girl to pray for a monster to eat them. But not all her foster families were bad, yet the monster didn’t spare them. Aurora figured that the monster actually wanted to eat her because she was ‘wicked,’ and when it failed to get to her, it ate her family because the monster knew that she didn’t deserve one. We get to see traces of Aurora’s insecurities as she tries to understand why the monster killed her foster families. Perhaps she’d realized that she wasn’t quite like girls her age, and that made her assume that she was ‘wicked,’ or maybe one of her foster parents used the word to describe her when they caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Growing up alone, without a place to call home, had resulted in Aurora wondering if she wasn’t good enough. Since she’d lost pretty much everyone she’d ever started to consider as family, she had come to accept that maybe she was truly evil. The Intriguing Neighbor resonated with the little girl’s unspoken sadness. Just like Aurora, there were days when he too felt self-critical and believed that he didn’t deserve to be happy. Loneliness often caught up with him, but the assignments perhaps kept him going. The more he got to know Aurora, the more he felt the need to protect her from the harsh world.
Why was the FBI at Aurora’s place?
Turns out, Brenda wasn’t a social service representative; she was with the FBI! Now, why was the FBI at Aurora’s apartment? The Intriguing Neighbor and Aurora had just returned home from dinner at Chinatown when Brenda stopped by the apartment again. The Intriguing Neighbor figured there was no point in lying to Brenda about who he was (well, partly so). He, of course, didn’t tell her that he was an assassin and that a group of men had followed him and Aurora from Chinatown and had every intention of breaking into the apartment and killing him. But he did tell her that he was just an intrigued neighbor who had stopped by the apartment when the little girl told him that a monster had eaten her parents. He didn’t think the little girl was lying; he thought she was delusional, but at the same time he believed there was something mysterious at play that would explain what happened to her previous foster families. There was clearly someone out there carrying out the murders, but he couldn’t figure out who it was and the reason behind it. But the Intriguing Neighbor had figured out that Brenda was FBI, and if he told her that the group of men waiting down the road were somehow connected to the disappearances of Aurora’s foster parents (something that she’d been investigating), then she might call her team in and help him take them down. And well, he was right. The FBI agents Brenda had called for help arrived at the scene, and while they asked the armed goons to surrender, they weren’t too keen on getting down on the floor. They’d seen the monster that Aurora had been trying to convince the world existed, and they’d realized that the only way to survive it was by not stepping on the floor. After the agents repeatedly asked them to surrender, they had no choice but to comply, and in the end, the monster got them all. The Intriguing Neighbor was hiding in the washroom, and he finally admitted that maybe Aurora was right. There really was a monster living under her bed.
How did the ‘Intriguing Neighbor’ survive?
Before Brenda was swallowed by the fuzzy monster, she’d told the Intriguing Neighbor that in the first foster home they’d found an open bottle of thumb-sucking deterrent kept right on Aurora’s nightstand. They’d figured that someone had been applying it on Aurora, and surprisingly they found the applicator brush under the floor bed beneath Aurora’s bed, suggesting that the monster had gulped the brush but detested its flavor and threw it up. This piece of information played a vital role in saving the Intriguing Neighbor’s life. After everyone was eaten away by the monster, the neighbor finally abided by Aurora’s one distinct instruction—don’t walk on the floor. He tried to make it to Aurora’s room so that they could escape through the window together. But the dust bunny monster got the Intriguing Neighbor before they could even execute the plan. Aurora watched her favorite person get swallowed by the monster, but by then she’d come to accept it as just fate.
The next morning, when she woke up, she was elated and emotional—the Intriguing Neighbor emerged from the wooden floor. Turns out, he’d been holding onto the thumb-sucking deterrent that he’d found in the washroom, and the monster didn’t like the taste and spat him out. Soon, the Intriguing Neighbor’s handler showed up, whom he unexpectedly referred to as his ‘mom’ (were they actually related and was that how he got introduced to the violent world, or was it the nature of their relationship and his affection for her, that made him call her that? The film leaves it up for the audience to decide) She desperately wanted to get rid of Aurora, but before she could do so, guess what? The monster ate her!
What does the final scene suggest?
One thing was clear: nothing could stop the fuzzy monster. When Aurora and her potential foster father tried to escape through the window, the monster attempted to swallow the neighbor again, but this time, Aurora guarded him.
Dust Bunny’s ending indicates that the monster only listens to Aurora. Since she was the one who’d wished for it, she had complete control over it. The little girl had always assumed that the monster would eat her up, but it was only after she tried to defend the Intriguing Neighbor that she found out that she was the only one who could stop it. The film doesn’t arrive at the conclusion that the monster wasn’t real and that it was only a figment of Aurora’s imagination. Instead, one can derive that the monster was a manifestation of Aurora’s fear. It was born the day Aurora felt terrified and wished on a shooting star for a monster that would take away her ‘not-so-nice’ family. But there were days when her fear got the best of her, and the monster took control of her life. She lacked the courage or the conviction to fight it; maybe she didn’t have a reason good enough to want to take the risk, so she succumbed to its monstrosity and accepted the damages as her personal misfortune. Although her friendship with Intriguing Neighbor was new, she felt a deep connection with him that made her want to overcome her fear of being abandoned and embrace him completely. As someone who drifted from one foster family to another, it is not surprising that Aurora was incredibly afraid of being abandoned. No one ever went to the great lengths her neighbor did just to protect her, and perhaps that was why the monster always got them. To think of it, the monster was the little girl’s defense mechanism; any time she felt she wasn’t loved or cared for, she pushed away those around her, and the monster ultimately ate them and offered her a new beginning. The magical element, of course, lies in the fact that there really was a monster that ate people away, and while the symbolic interpretation of it all is already presented, there is also no denying that this magical, unbelievable component is something that the film urges the audience to believe in. The film ultimately says that, hey, this is all real, and perhaps the next time if a kid tells you something fantastical, maybe try understanding their world instead of dulling it down! The little girl and the Intriguing Neighbor figured they had finally found the family that they’d always been searching for. He decided to call her ‘little girl’ instead of Aurora since it didn’t roll easily on his tongue. In the final scene, the two leave the apartment and drive through a sunflower field; life finally feels good. The monster continues to follow Aurora like a shadow, suggesting that her fear didn’t leave her side, but she’d learn to not let it overwhelm her.
In the mid-credit scene, we discover that Brenda survived, or at least she wasn’t consumed by the monster. She looked completely washed-out and seemed pretty lost. If she survives and manages to get over this traumatic experience, then she might either want to track down the Intriguing Neighbor and the little girl and find out more about the monster (and maybe kill it) or just never think about that night ever again and move on; hopefully she’ll choose the latter.
