‘Mud Bunny’ evaluate: Mads Mikkelsen performs a useful killer in a darkish fantasy

TV legend Bryan Fuller, recognized for his cult classics “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal,” simply earned an Impartial Spirit Award nomination for first function. It’s one way or the other a shock that the well-known creator simply directed his first film, after spending nearly three a long time working in tv on sequence like “Lifeless Like Me” and “American Gods.” Now he turns to the world of indie movie, reuniting with actor Mads Mikkelsen, his Hannibal Lecter, on the darkish fairy story “Mud Bunny.”

Fuller has a factor for idioms, extending them to their most excessive ends (e.g., “pushing daisies”), and so in “Mud Bunny,” he imagines what these bits of fluff could possibly be if our nightmares got here to life. He additionally posits an outlandish notion: What if a child employed an murderer to kill the monster below her mattress?

Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is an imaginative younger woman who hears issues that roar and scream within the evening. The mud bunny below her mattress is a ravenous, monstrous factor. When her mother and father go lacking, she’s satisfied they’ve been eaten by the monster bunny, and seeks out the companies of an “intriguing neighbor” (Mikkelsen, that’s how he’s credited) whom she has seen vanquishing dragons within the alley exterior. With a charge that she purloins from a church assortment plate, she implores him for assist and he agrees, as he learns extra about this younger woman’s difficult childhood.

At first, “Mud Bunny” feels just a little mild, the story skittering throughout its densely designed floor, with little or no dialogue within the first half. However it grows and grows, extra bits and items accumulating as Fuller reveals this unusual, heightened world. We meet Intriguing Neighbor’s handler, Laverne (Sigourney Weaver), revealing the bigger Wickian world of killers that he inhabits.Weaver chomps by her scenes just like the monster bunny chomps by the floorboards — actually, as she consumes charcuterie, dumplings and “suckling pig tea sandwiches” with gusto. Some monsters grin at us from throughout the desk.

The movie is basically “Leon: The Skilled” meets “Amélie” (one in all Fuller’s favourite movies), however along with his distinct wit and aptitude. That type additionally implies that “Mud Bunny” is sort of fussy and mannered and in the event you don’t purchase in on the movie’s arch humor and stylized world, you’re liable to bounce proper off of it. As Fuller opens the world up, revealing a sly FBI agent (Sheila Atim) and extra baddies (David Dastmalchian, Rebecca Henderson), the plot turns into extra intriguing past its unwieldy childhood-trauma metaphor, however there’s additionally not fairly sufficient embroidered on this tapestry. It feels shallow, not fleshed out.

Fuller demonstrates a powerful command over his visible area however the pat allegory he presents in regards to the monsters with whom now we have to study to stay feels a bit muddled. Sloan and Mikkelsen are terrific collectively, however you are feeling that there’s rather more they may have sunk their tooth into right here, and maybe the bounds of the story reveal the bounds of the funds, fastidiously wallpapered over with opulent manufacturing design — explosions of patterns and shade crafted by Jeremy Reed, captured with shadowy however lush cinematography by Nicole Hirsch Whitaker.

It’s a primary function that seems like one — a little bit of a shock from somebody so skilled. However the undertaking has Fuller’s signature type, even when it doesn’t add as much as rather more than a neat kiddie-centric hard-R style train.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune Information Service movie critic.