Two Auteurs, Two Gems

I was going to write about some catalogue titles this week, but there’s been a bit of a shuffle in the release schedule – and also I wiped out on a bike on Tuesday morning, which has slowed me down some. (Just some scrapes and bruises, could have been so much worse, but … ow.)

However! Two new releases showed up earlier than I’d expected, so I can write about them instead! You know how I loved Highest 2 Lowest and Dust Bunny last year? Well, now you can love them at home!

Seven years after the Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman reinvigorated his career, Spike Lee continues to cook, spending his capital on a variety of features and documentaries like it’s his ’90s glory days – only now he doesn’t have anything to prove.

With Highest 2 Lowest, Lee brings his old pal Denzel Washington back into the fold for a gleaming update of Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant 1963 blackmail thriller High and Low – itself an adaptation of Evan Hunter’s novel King’s Ransom.

Washington, who hadn’t worked with Lee since their 2006 thriller Inside Man, plays recording-industry mogul David King, who’s about to complete a power play that will save his company when he learns his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped. Scrambling to pay the ransom, King and his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) discover the kidnapper has mistakenly grabbed Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of King’s chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright) instead … so now King has to decide whether to trade his company, and his family’s security, for someone else’s kid.

Washington doesn’t try to channel Toshiro Mifune, and Lee doesn’t try to channel Kurosawa; they’re doing their own thing, throwing new twists into the story designed to keep us on our toes. King’s a more active player in the hunt for the kidnapper now, and the second half of the film bobs and weaves with a nervous energy that feels almost antithetical to the crisp procedural pacing of its predecessor. (In other words, this is nothing at all like Lee’s abominable 2013 remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy.)

It’s a pleasure to watch Washington and Wright bounce off each other with Lee at the helm, and a pleasure to watch Lee work, full stop; the guy is working at his peak, and he’s doing whatever the hell he wants.

In addition to a reference-quality presentation of the feature, in Dolby Vision and Atmos, A24’s 4K disc offers a modest but solid supplemental section. The polished production featurette, “King’s Ransom,” opens by acknowledging the movie’s debt to Kurosawa’s High and Low even as Lee declares his film isn’t a remake. (He eventually explains that the script is based more closely on Hunter’s source novel, which, fair.)

The Lee-Washington reunion gets at least as much screen time, as it should, and the pair discuss that further in a separate featurette, “Legends Only,” where they sit down to kibitz about their history and how it informed their collaboration here. It’s the most relaxed and thoughtful I’ve seen either of them, and it could have gone on so much longer than 15 minutes. Which reminds me, I really should revisit Inside Man one of these days.

There’s also a video for Aiyana-Lee’s title song, directed by Spike Lee, shot on Super 8 and 16mm film as well as 24fps video for a gorgeous juxtaposition of grain and digital clarity. It’s even more of a celebration of New York locations than the movie, and the song’s not bad either. And of course the package includes six film-themed postcards, though these are a little more stylish than A24’s usual selection. It’s all good stuff.

And speaking of artists whose register is unique to themselves: Who else but Bryan Fuller, creator of such beguiling, unquantifiable television entertainments as Pushing Daisies and Hannibal, could deliver a monster movie that can be described as “unexpectedly charming?”

But that’s exactly what he’s given us in Dust Bunny, a thriller about a little girl who hires an assassin to dispatch the creature under her bed. Technically it’s under the floorboards, emerging to gobble up anyone foolish enough to tread on them. It’s a monster, it has a system.

The little girl is Aurora (newcomer Sophie Sloan), who’s clearly a kid who spends a lot of time in her head, and the question of whether her monster even exists is a logical one. Certainly it’s the first thing her neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen, of course) wants to know, the second being why Aurora thinks he can do anything about it. Her answer is that she’s just watched him slay a dragon – and we saw it too, sort of.

One thing leads to another, and soon enough the stoic neighbor is fully on Team Aurora, defending her against all sorts of hostile entities and agencies. Aurora’s backstory is a lot more complicated than one might expect from a child, but fortunately her protector has a system of his own. Maybe he’s a monster too. But if he is, he’s a good one.

Making his first feature after decades in television, Fuller does that thing where he lets loose on a level he was never permitted previously – even on the later seasons of Hannibal, where he and Mikkelsen refracted the grotesqueries of several Thomas Harris novels into glorious absurdist comedy. Mikkelsen is, obviously, fully on Fuller’s wavelength, carrying himself with a grumpy-uncle affect that lends itself to some marvelously blasé fight choreography; Sloan is a genuine discovery, impatient with adults who won’t believe her and headstrong enough to plow through whatever barriers they put in front of her. And yeah, the worst-case version of this pitch may be “The Professional, but with a monster instead of Gary Oldman” … but it turns out the best version is “a film by Bryan Fuller.” And that is a glorious thing indeed.

As far as I can tell, Lionsgate is only releasing Dust Bunny in 4K – I’ve seen no indication of either a Blu-ray or DVD release. Perhaps it’s because Fuller and his cinematographer, Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, shot the film in the impossibly wide 3:1 aspect ratio, the better to collapse the frame around the characters and create a sense of claustrophobic space appropriate to the levels of an apartment building. It also makes the smaller details that much more difficult to realize at lower resolutions, as anyone who recently upgraded their Ben-Hur disc will tell you; until I played this disc, I would have told you the digital version I watched last fall looked fine. And now I know better. (The atmospheric Atmos track is merely the icing on the cake.)

Extras include “Making Dust Bunny,” a production featurette with cast and crew interviews and plenty of fascinating b-roll, including glimpses of the practical creature effects, and a selection of Instagram reels, none running longer than 61 seconds. (The highlight of these, of course, is “Mads Mikkelsen Presents Action Figure Choreography.”) The theatrical trailer rounds out the package, reminding us how careful one has to be when selling a movie like this.

Highest 2 Lowest is now available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions in the A24 Store, and at select retailers. Dust Bunny is available in 4K – and 4K only! – from Lionsgate.

Up next: Those catalogue movies I promised you! Well, most of them. One just got bumped to next month. But before that, there’s Friday’s What’s Worth Watching recommendations for those of you on the paid tier. Want to upgrade that subscription to see what you’re missing? You can! And I’d be right grateful, I would.