Movie review
December 11, 2025 · 106 min · R
Woke Score
Lower is better
Review
Dust Bunny is a 2025 fantasy action horror movie directed by Bryan Fuller. A ten-year-old girl named Aurora believes a monster under her bed ate her family and hires her hitman neighbor to kill it. He teams up with her to fight real assassins while both confront their own monsters in a dark fairy tale style. The story focuses on childhood imagination, loss, and protection through whimsical visuals and action.
Breakdown
These are the editorial factors and ratings behind our score for Dust Bunny.
Woke representation / casting
Prominent roles center on a young girl protagonist whose agency fits the fairy tale premise and a skilled male hitman protector. Supporting cast mixes international actors in an urban setting without audience-visible quotas, identity signaling, or emphasis on race/gender competence tropes in marketing or reviews.
Woke political dialogue
No activist speeches, identity discussions, or political messaging appear in the story, dialogue, or structure. It uses straightforward fairy tale logic and action beats.
Identity-driven story themes
The story explores childhood imagination, loss, and unlikely alliances through fairy tale and horror logic. Fuller's interviews link the child's self-championing and found family to queer experiences, but the narrative itself keeps trauma vague and universal with no specific LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or identity-driven plot structure.
Western institutional / cultural critique
The narrative presents competent male protection and direct conflict resolution without activist critiques of patriarchy, toxic masculinity, family structures, or Western institutions.
Production
Woke character or canon changes
Not relevant. This is an original story with no established characters, source material, or historical figures altered for ideological or identity-driven reasons.
Anti-woke backlash and complaints
No public complaints, reviews, or social media posts frame the film as pushing woke, DEI, identity politics, or left-wing agendas. Response stays centered on style and entertainment.
Creator track record context
Bryan Fuller has a long record of queer-inclusive storytelling in television. For Dust Bunny, he publicly stated in interviews that a child championing themselves "feels like a queer story" and tied found family and the protagonist's alienation to his own experiences as a queer child who felt disenfranchised, while keeping the on-screen trauma deliberately open for audience projection. Other producers have minimal such associations.
