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What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Sound the Bryan Fuller Klaxon! Dust Bunny Is Streaming on HBO Max
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What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Sound the Bryan Fuller Klaxon! Dust Bunny Is Streaming on HBO Max
Plus: Mother Mary, and a surprisingly wholesome connection between Fight Club and dogs
By Molly Templeton
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Published on April 24, 2026
Image: Lionsgate
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Image: Lionsgate
Somehow, Friday came around again. Felt like it took a minute, though. Somehow, it is also almost May, but I’m not going to think about that just yet. There’s just so much to do, and to read, and to watch, and everything this week is just a little bit creepy. We’re not venturing into full-on horror territory, at least not so far as I can tell—just going places that are off somehow. A little askew. A little out of the realm of our world. Or, well, maybe just terrible, at least in the case of Widow’s Bay. I just feel pretty strongly that any small town that loudly insists it’s done no cannibalism is probably lying about something.
May there be no small-town (or mall) (or monster) horrors in your weekend. Soak up some sun, hug your friends, and call your reps before you settle in for your watching and/or reading!
Sometimes Mads Mikkelsen Is the Monster Under the Bed, and Sometimes He Hunts the Monster Under the Bed
Late last year, Bryan Fuller’s feature film debut Dust Bunny was in theaters for what felt like about five minutes. I missed it. Probably a lot of people missed it. But our time is now: Dust Bunny is now on HBO Max. The movie is about a little girl who hires Mads Mikkelsen to kill the monster under her bed. It is, of course, about a lot more than that, but the premise—at least in the hands of Pushing Daisies and Hannibal creator Fuller—is almost enough for me as-is. “Fairy tale—the old kind with blood and death and dread—is pretty firmly where Dust Bunny resides,” wrote Emmet Asher-Perrin in the second of two pieces about the film. (This one probably has spoilers, so I only read the first two paragraphs. Just a warning.) The trailer looks cool and perfect in a perfectly cool Bryan Fuller way. I am confident that I will see something in this movie that I’ve never seen before—beyond the already-fantastic image of Mikkelsen in a yellow tracksuit. I’m going to make a date with myself to watch this as soon as humanly possible, and I’m going to love it.
What Is It About Small Towns, Though: Widow’s Bay
HBO Max has a lot going on this week, or at least a couple of things. On the 29th, the new series Widow’s Bay premieres. I do not know what to make of the one trailer for this series, which is vague, maybe sort of funny, and also very threatening. The show begins in five days, and there has only been the one little teaser. That feels very sneaky! But it has a couple of things on its sneaky little side: Matthew Rhys, perpetually excellent in everything for a couple of decades now (including The Americans and Perry Mason), and creator Katie Dippold, whose background is mostly in funny things, like Parks and Recreation and the movie The Heat. The synopsis explains that Rhys plays the mayor, who the locals sneer at for being soft. But I’m suspicious. I think his face looks a little … untrustworthy. I think there might be more going on there. Next week, we’ll all get to find out.
But Also About Malls. And Sometimes Plants?
Speaking of familiar spaces and uneasy relationships between longtime tenants and newcomers, Sarah Maria Griffin’s excellent novel Eat the Ones You Love is now out in paperback. Come for the quarter-life crisis; stay for the precision-crafted portrait of a dying mall; get wrapped up in the needs of a very hungry plant. Said plant lives at the heart of the mall and has viny tendrils in absolutely everything, but especially the heart of the woman who runs the flower shop. Her new employee, Shell Pine, has recently moved home to reinvent herself after a breakup. Shell is a bit lost, a bit vulnerable, and totally unprepared for Baby, the plant at the center of the mall. But who could be prepared for a towering, hungry, human-eating plant? Yes, the premise says Little Shop of Horrors, but there’s so much more going on here, and Griffin draws the relationships among the mall’s remaining employees with love and familiarity. It’s such a good read.
Mother Mary: Mother May I?
To return to the theme of “I don’t exactly know what’s going on here, but I think I like it?” we have Mother Mary, the latest film from The Green Knight director David Lowery. That movie was green; this one is all gothic gray and blue before it leans into red. (At least in the trailer.) The story is something about a fraught friendship between Anne Hathaway’s pop star and Micaela Coel’s designer. The draw is Lowery’s lush imagery (red! RED) and the crackling tension between the two women. And also the fact that I have watched every trailer for this movie and I have no idea what it’s about. How refreshing! Reviews, perhaps unsurprisingly, are all over the place. It’s lush! It’s empty! It’s familiar! It’s weird! It’s too glossy! I’m intrigued by what Brian Tallerico wrote at RogerEbert.com: “It is another story about the intersection of fame and art, but it’s not like one you’ve seen before, a two-hander that owes as much to The Exorcist as it does to Lady Gaga.” Does this not appeal? Will it not entertain? I’m betting it will.
The First Rule of Fight Club Is…
My personal first rule of Fight Club is that I am generally wary of discussing Fight Club. You just don’t know which kind of Fight Club people you’re going to get: the ones who take it at face value or the ones who think there’s a lot going on under the surface, that it’s really necessary not to take it at face value. But I do feel strongly that of the two big, attention-grabbing films of 1999, Fight Club is superior to American Beauty. And I went to see it on the big screen last night, here in Portland, because it was showing as a fundraiser for a local theater, and author Chuck Palahniuk did a Q&A afterward.
The movie holds up. It’s gross, it’s funny, it’s not even that violent by modern standards; it’s mean, it’s sly, and it’s pretty incredible to watch once you understand what’s really going on with the characters. I thought a lot about my beloved Mr. Robot, and how deeply it walks in Fight Club‘s footsteps—something I never thought about while that show was on, just because I hadn’t seen this movie in so very, very long. And it also grows more interesting when you hear Palahniuk talk about it, and about his work in general, and his avoidance of victimizing characters. Listening to him talk is very interesting because the man is a master of answering questions without actually answering the question that was asked. One of his elusive-but-revealing answers involved telling a story about his dog, who died recently, and about how expensive emergency pet care is. Palahniuk has set up a living trust that means that all the money from his work will, eventually, go to a program called the Velvet Assistance Fund, which pays for treatment of sick pets. So whenever you see Fight Club, or read a Palahniuk book, you are, in a way, contributing to that fund. I think that’s beautiful, so I wanted you to know about it.[end-mark]
The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Sound the Bryan Fuller Klaxon! <i>Dust Bunny</i> Is Streaming on HBO Max appeared first on Reactor.