One of 2025’s Most Unusual Movies Just Hit HBO Max — and It’s a Must-Watch
After collecting dust at the box office despite rave reviews, the dark fantasy action film Dust Bunny hops onto HBO Max, giving Bryan Fuller, creator of NBC’s Hannibal, a second shot at an audience for his feature debut.
Dust Bunny barely made a ripple in theaters last year even though critics were into it. Now it is on HBO Max and finally has a real shot at being discovered. It is the feature directing debut of Bryan Fuller (yep, the Hannibal guy), and he reunites with his old star Mads Mikkelsen for a dark fantasy action story that plays smarter than it looks. If you skipped it before, this is the time to catch up.
Three reasons to put Dust Bunny in your HBO Max queue
- Mads Mikkelsen is locked in — Mikkelsen is famous for playing elegant monsters (Hannibal Lecter, Casino Royale's Le Chiffre, Fantastic Beasts' Grindelwald), and on paper his character here is another cold-blooded pro: an unnamed hitman who can turn pretty much anything into a weapon. Then the kid next door, Aurora (newcomer Sophie Sloan), tries to hire him to kill the monster under her bed. She saw him in action and mistook a flurry of very real bad guys for one big boogeyman. He is baffled at first, then starts to suspect her story might not be just a bedtime panic attack. The way his ice thaws into something protective gives the movie a 'wholesome Leon: The Professional' vibe, and his chemistry with Sloan (who is excellent in her first film role) sells it.
- It walks a tightrope between fantasy and reality — The movie mostly locks us into Aurora's point of view. When she feels the monster in her room, we see it, even as everyone else shrugs it off. The hitman thinks her 'monster' is really a very human threat aimed at him, nothing supernatural about it. He is not wrong to be paranoid — multiple attempts on his life keep proving that — and he chalks her visions up to her age. But the film keeps needling you to question what you are seeing. For Aurora, the monster is absolutely real; for him, it is the brutal underworld he lives in. Watching those two realities collide is the whole point.
- It refuses to play it safe — The supporting cast is stacked and sharp: Sigourney Weaver brings a nasty edge as a woman named Laverine; David Dastmalchian and Rebecca Henderson show up as rival assassins with no names but plenty of menace; and Sheila Atim is terrific as Brenda, a social worker who turns out to be more complicated than she looks. The movie seems to be lining up for a John Wick-style final stretch, then veers somewhere far stranger. No spoilers, but the closing minutes are genuinely unpredictable, and the film quietly planted the clues for that turn the whole time.
Bottom line: Dust Bunny is a dark fantasy action story that got lost at the theater but deserves an audience now. It is streaming on HBO Max, and it is an easy recommend this May.