‘Dust Bunny’ Is the Toronto Film Festival’s Craziest Film

As demonstrated by his cult TV hits Pushing Daisies and Hannibal, Bryan Fuller isn’t one to play it safe

With Dust Bunny—his feature directorial debut, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in its Midnight Madness program—he goes way out on a limb, crafting a genre-bending fairy tale about things that go bump in the night.

Heavily indebted to the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Luc Besson (among others), Fuller’s wacko film concerns a young girl who, convinced that there’s a monster under her bed, hires her next-door neighbor, a hitman, to take care of it before it swallows her whole. Blending horror and humor, sweetness and scares, and fantasy and family melodrama, it shoots for the moon—and, more often than not, scores a bullseye.

Through an open window that looks out