After many years of making masterful tv with Pushing Daisies, Lifeless Like Me, and the without end yearned-for Hannibal, it was solely a matter of time earlier than Bryan Fuller took his concepts from the TV display to the silver display. Fuller’s earlier work is prestigious for a motive: He’s capable of delight and horrify his viewers in equal measure, typically by shining a lightweight on our needs and fears, warping them into one thing fantastical that also feels too shut for consolation. So it’s no shock that his function directorial debut, Mud Bunny, efficiently channels that very same sentiment with the glee of Hannibal Lecter feeding a person his personal leg.
The story begins in a New York Metropolis condominium constructing, the place 8-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) hires her murderer neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen in a much-hyped Hannibal reunion) to kill the monster residing beneath her mattress. As anticipated, the hitman (labeled “Intriguing Neighbor” within the credit) isn’t too enthused by the task, and doesn’t consider Aurora’s tall tales. He has larger issues of his personal to cope with: his job has put an enormous goal on his again.
The conflict of the mundane and the unbelievable is what Fuller does greatest — and identical to in Pushing Daisies and Hannibal, he makes that dissonance really feel fashionable right here. Watching Mikkelsen stroll down a unclean alleyway with blue, pink, and inexperienced fireworks lighting up the sky like a mosaic, or an murderer concealing himself inside the flowery gray wallpaper of Aurora’s condominium, Fuller’s followers will see his fingerprints etched in every single place.
The largest inform is the meals. Hannibal followers know Fuller likes to make meals seem like artwork — earlier than underscoring it with one thing disturbing. He does so once more in Mud Bunny. At one level, Mikkelsen’s murderer and Aurora dig right into a rabbit-shaped dumpling with eyes manufactured from seaweed. Nonetheless, when the hitman bites into it, it wriggles as if it’s alive. In one other scene, Mikkelsen is obtainable a sandwich that appears like an bizarre sandwich, however from one other angle, it resembles ribbons of flesh curled collectively. It’s a blink-and-miss-it second, but it surely’s so visually distinct you’ll have it seared onto the again of your eyelids all the identical.
Fuller has stated that his aim was to make a “youngsters’s film that folks would get pleasure from watching with their youngsters.” It’s a disgrace, then, that this film received an R score — a classification that feels unwarranted, contemplating the shortage of blood, profanity, and gore. Mud Bunny feels precisely like a horror fairy story ripped straight from a Brothers Grimm ebook.
Even the characters’ names replicate these fairy-tale parts. Aurora shares the identify of the protagonist in Disney’s 1959 movie Sleeping Magnificence, and many of the different characters have signifiers relatively than names. For instance, David Dastmalchian’s and Rebecca Henderson’s characters are recognized solely as Conspiciously Inconspicious Man and Intimidating Girl. By way of Aurora’s eyes, we see these characters as caricatures relatively than individuals. This broadness makes them really feel foreboding and ominous, revealing how Aurora sees the grownup world’s tangible however barely understood threats. Nonetheless, they’re nonetheless much less threatening than the terrifying monster beneath her mattress.
However whereas Mud Bunny scales down the gore and guts one would possibly anticipate from Fuller, who used a lot pretend blood on Hannibal that mould began to develop on the set, Fuller hasn’t softened his razor-sharp edges, both. He likes to twist viewers expectations, and whereas his script very a lot leans into child horror, Mud Bunny makes an extremely mundane factor — a literal mud bunny beneath Aurora’s mattress — really feel like a loaded gun.
However the greatest subversion comes from the connection between Mikkelsen’s hitman and Aurora. Mikkelsen is well-known for taking part in villains, together with Hannibal Lecter in Fuller’s Hannibal collection. However the place his Lecter is a calculating predator whose perception within the great and the insane leads him to locations no individual would go with out a gun, Mud Bunny’s hitman is a distinct beast. He’s gruff and deadly, however with a tender, quirky aspect. He defines himself as a monster, however Aurora displays his personal childlike fears and innocence. There’s a loneliness to him, a way of neglect, that at occasions makes it appear to be precocious, no-nonsense Aurora is the father or mother of their relationship. It’s the correct amount of candy and discomforting.
Mud Bunny might not utterly scratch the unhinged itch that Fuller’s earlier kaleidoscope of horror and comedy tasks gave, largely as a result of it’s a lot extra kid-friendly. Regardless of the R score, Fuller’s imaginative and prescient for Mud Bunny is for youths who really feel just like the outsider. Mud Bunny speaks to your interior baby, whereas additionally being a not-so-gentle reminder that your fears are solely as robust as you make them out to be. It’s a visually and thematically distinct horror fairytale, and one which followers of Fuller will love.
Mud Bunny debuted in theaters on Dec. 12.
