Buddy (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

You've heard of the recent spate of gory horror flicks based on children's tales now in the public domain, yes? While I haven't yet experienced the guaranteed atrocities -- Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare, Bambi: The Reckoning, and Pinocchio Unstrung -- the trailers for Buddy had me worried about something similar. The titular figure, an anthropomorphic giant orange unicorn manifesting as a man in an oversized mascot costume, is a clear analogy to a figure like Barney or Big Bird, hosting an "educational" children's show teaching morals like telling the truth, being a friend, and cleaning up our messes. He snaps, going on a rampage with an axe, butchering the other characters trapped in his world.

But the film was -- to my surprise -- a psychological thrill ride loaded with deep questions about nostalgia, identity, and the dangerous ways we interact with both. Combining themes of absurdist entrapment from Severance and The Truman Show with Samuel Beckett's plays might be a lot to say of this film, but it certainly had me making those associations over its brief but effective 90-ish minutes. Actually, the best analogue to this film would be creator Casper Kelly's short film entitled Too Many Cooks, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in nightmare scenarios around childhood television shows. Actually, this might make for a cool double feature with Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow for the same reason. That which is comforting and fun becomes darker and dangerous as we sense its sinister reality bleeding into our own. 

The films' first act was my favorite: a Groundhog Day-esque series of truncated "episodes" of It's Buddy are strung together, end-to-end, as we meet the various child actors and their puppet-like friends who inhabit the television world. The mail carrier and nurse are human adults, but there's also a talking train engine, mailbox, backpack, flowers, and a giant friendly rabbit. The show is knowingly creepy -- Kelly clearly had a lot of demented fun riffing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" into a cult chant with adoring lyrics to the orange unicorn --and is designed to prey on millennial discomfort with knowledge of who inhabited those beloved yet inherently uncanny characters. Kelly slows things down with an incredibly deliberate pace, stretching out the film while packing in details and philosophic musings with gobsmacking economy. I think I counted at least three "episodes" before our first possible break from the show's usual format, and it feels like it, though I'm sure barely half an hour had passed by first bloodshed.

Because, dear reader, blood indeed flows. This is no gorefest like I feared, which makes Buddy's chosen moments of violence particularly nasty. No spoilers, but things start fairly tame and mysterious, but when Kelly decides to fuck with us, he doesn't hold back. Buddy himself -- voiced by Keegan-Michael Key -- is patently unhinged, a sort of charismatic and aggressively intimidating cult leader who demands everyone listen and adhere to his sense of how things should be in his world. His purported wisdom gets shallower and more desperate over time, and when he resorts to violence to maintain his control, he does so with a detached, almost cheerful inevitability. With cheerful voice he metes out both instructions and punishments in the style of Mr. Milchick in Severance, a sort of forcedly sweet hierarchical superior's tone that chuckles even as it tells you to obey.

The child actors are all excellent, and the featured adult roles -- especially by Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace -- added a wholly unexpected parallel dimension to the film when they're introduced in its second act. I can't spoil any more about the film's plot or structure because this truly is an experience you need to enter cold. With sly references to things like Beau is Afraid, Poltergeist, and even The Wizard of Oz, Buddy works on several levels simultaneously, engaging your mind and spirit with its twisted sense of what disturbs and unsettles us. While its ending left a bit to be desired from me -- it's shockingly bleak, and seems to want to open the door for a sequel I'm not sure we need -- this one will haunt my waking brain for some time yet.