Buddy Review – He Just Wants to Play, Guys!

There increasingly seems to be no corner of our culture, no matter how apparently innocent, that’s free from our deepest nightmares. Casper Kelly’s Buddy is one of the newest manifestations of that idea. To be clear, the film doesn’t invent the idea of children’s mascots masking a sinister evil, but the film is a distinctive experience in the lengths it goes to replicate the hallmarks of G-rated children’s television material – only to upend the wholesome environment with abject terror.

At face value, the film joins such recent flicks as Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) and The Banana Splits Movie (2019) as movies that use the iconography of children’s entertainment as instruments for subversive horror. Yet, Buddy’s flavor of disturbia feels unique to itself, placing us, the audience, deeper into a psychological honey trap by use of its alluring replication of nostalgic television conventions. It’s a film that balances parody and satiric paranoia all at once. Films of similar ilk may leverage the iconography it borrows for subversive scares, but Kelly (perhaps inadvertently) has stumbled on something that leaves you feeling uneasy about the very medium the film borrows its premise, leaving us to question if there was something sinister there all along.

The story kicks off by taking us into the bizarre world of the television show It’s Buddy! A riff on classic PBS children’s shows, most notably Barney & Friends, the show is a sappy, over the top buffet of positivity. Buddy the unicorn (voice of Keegan Michael Key), along with his bevy of  animatronic and personified object pals, hosts the show as he leads a cast of young kids into various fun activities and valuable lessons. Events such as learning how to clean up can take up entire episodes. The dialogue is pointedly hokey, and the photography is garish and colorful. We aren’t given an explanation on what this world is, or where these children came from… but hey, Buddy and his neverending giggles seem happy as hell to be shepherding the kids’ development, so all seems right with the world. That is until a few fortuitous events begin to tug on Buddy’s subtle control of this environment, exposing a much more possessive and domineering persona. Soon, the kids begin to question just how safe they are in this land of sunshine and rainbows.

What helps to pull you in immediately to Buddy is how unsettling it is from the very start. Even if you went in not knowing the type of movie you’re in for, there’s just something a little… off about the world you’re being presented. It’s playing all the hits and hallmarks of children’s shows, including the ridiculous opening theme song, but there’s something you just don’t buy about the setting. There’s a sense of unspoken dread hanging over the smiles and the songs, perhaps because they’re so over the top and saccharine – as if you can feel the performance being put on, a lack of authencity betraying the audience’s want to let their guard down. That’s a credit to the filmmakers, who have done their homework on every simplistic plotline and goofy ass bit of dialogue you can picture in these type of shows, but repackaged for us in an onslaught of sugary vibes – an atmosphere that communicates to us that things are too good to be true.

The child actors give strong performances, most notably Delaney Quinn and Caleb Williams, and really help to sell the believability of this strange world. Their performances smoothly transition from the cheesy tone of the children’s shows, to the nightmarish predicament they find themselves in. Keegan Michael Key’s voice work is excellent; not only is he almost unrecognizable to the ear, his delivery vacillates between playful and eerie without betraying the “fluffiness” of this creepy unicorn. Even when he’s upset, Key plays it like it’s just a slight misunderstanding, and everything can get back on track as long as everyone does what he says to make him happy.

However, where the movie begins to falter a bit is in the handling of its B plot. Cristin Milioti, as usual, turns in a solid performance as a woman with an initially mysterious connection to the Buddy show. Her and Topher Grace both put in strong work in isolation, yet there feels like there’s scenes on the cutting room floor that could make this portion of the movie connect stronger to the A plot. Near the climax, there are pretty important beats the movie tries to sell us on, but they do not hit as hard as they should because we simply haven’t spent enough time with those characters or given enough backstory to elicit stronger emotions.

However, those earlier scenes still have value by way of giving us some well-acted scenes with Milioti abd Grace, whose dynamic together is frosty. Both characters represent a different relationship with media and how successful that media is at pulling the wool over your eyes. Buddy is perhaps at its most thematically rich as a flexible metaphor for the darkness behind our seemingly happy and perfect media landscape. The use of children’s labor to sell entertainment, and that entertainment often glossing over the harm being done to those children is an easily readable theme here. So is the broader idea of this duplicity being applicable to Hollywood, entertainment, popular culture, etc.

Buddy is vivid both in its visual design, but also its narrative aims. It’s an intriguing blend of traditional horror elements, and a wider conversation about manipulation and propaganda. What works about its premise is that the film hyper-focuses on a few ideas, prioritizing execution over ambition. Perhaps that also limits the movie in a way, placing a cap on just how far the filmmakers are willing to take such dark material. But their approach may actually prove to be more accessible for wider audiences, for those who just want to enjoy the creepy tone and the thrills, along with those who prefer to look deeper and consider the film’s metaphorical implication. Either way, Buddy is an easy watch as far as horror films go, a fun and at times comical descent into immature madness in an immature setting, but with just enough substance underneath the surface to give the project an edge. In turn, Buddy ends up retroactively brushing up with the memories of those old children’s shows, leaving us to wonder how much our televisions omitted from those “perfectly ideal” worlds.