Dust Bunny

Bryan Fuller and Mads Mikkelsen gave us one of television's greatest partnerships with HANNIBAL. More than a decade later, they're finally back together.

Ten-year-old Aurora is convinced the monster under her bed has eaten her entire family. Naturally, she hires the mysterious man next door to kill it. There's just one complication. Her neighbour isn't a monster hunter. He's a hitman. As the two form an unlikely friendship, what begins as a dark fairy tale soon spirals into a fantastical collision of assassins, childhood trauma and the uncomfortable possibility that some monsters really do exist.

Written and directed by Bryan Fuller in his feature directorial debut, DUST BUNNY blends horror, fantasy, action and pitch-black humour with the same visual imagination that made Pushing Daisies and Hannibal cult favourites. At its heart, though, it's a surprisingly tender story about grief, guilt and finding hope in the unlikeliest of places.

Mads is in magnificent form, effortlessly balancing menace, melancholy and deadpan humour opposite newcomer Sophie Sloan, whose performance has rightly attracted widespread praise. Strange, inventive and unlike anything else in this retrospective, DUST BUNNY is the perfect way to close MADSNESS: proof that, after three decades, Mads Mikkelsen is still finding surprising new places to take us.