Buddy

Buddy hit theaters August 28, 2026 after premiering at Sundance back in January. It’s the feature debut of Casper Kelly, best known for the Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, and he’s applying the same trick here: taking the aesthetic of old-school kids’ TV and warping it into something much darker. Buddy is a horror version of Barney, literally, framing itself scene-for-scene like an actual episode of a nineties children’s show, credits roll included. This is a movie I wanted to love. I don’t quite.

Buddy, a bright orange unicorn voiced by Keegan-Michael Key, headlines what looks like a completely standard nineties kids’ show, singing and dancing with a group of kids and teaching lessons like “you gotta be scared to be brave.” Not everything is what it seems. During a dance party segment, one kid, Josh, would rather read than dance. Buddy pushes back, offers magic dancing shoes, and when Josh keeps refusing, something happens off-screen. The show cuts back to the other kids dancing while Buddy claims Josh loved dancing so much he moved to the city to pursue it full time. The episode wraps with the usual closing song and credits, until one of the remaining kids, Freddy, spots Josh’s book in the trash, covered in blood. From there, she and the others start realizing Buddy is not who he’s presented himself to be, and the movie becomes about escaping him.

I wanted to love this and didn’t quite get there, though that’s not the same as disliking it. I had a genuinely good time with plenty of it. Buddy as a murderous Barney parody works. Set design and the show-world aesthetic are genuinely strong, nailing the exact nineties children’s-programming look closely enough that Buddy’s turn into violence lands harder for how authentic the surface stays. It’s most effective when he’s going after the other in-show characters, the sentient train, the anthropomorphic clock. There’s something inherently funny about a guy in a giant orange unicorn suit choking someone out, and the film knows it, I just wanted more of that specific energy. The bit where kids twisting Barney’s “I love you” song into “I hate you” actually has real narrative weight here is a fun touch. Key’s performance nails the kids’-mascot register well enough that plenty of people probably wouldn’t clock it as him.

The kids’ escape plotline is well handled. Watching them flee evil Barney is fun on its own, and it gets more interesting once they leave the show’s set and enter a world still dressed like a children’s program while the camera quality itself shifts. They run into a puppet and a grown man who escaped Buddy years earlier, and while those two characters land a little cringe, the underlying concept is strong. I wanted the whole movie to just be these kids navigating an escape from a corrupted children’s program. What’s here only lightly explores that idea; abandoned sets or detours through areas echoing other kids’ shows, something Sesame Street-adjacent, would have been a great direction to push further.

Spoilers from here.

After the kids narrowly escape, the film cuts away entirely to a real-world family: Cristin Milioti as Grace, Topher Grace as her husband Ben, two sons. Grace stares at an empty chair at dinner and spirals, convinced something is missing, a vague sense that a third child existed and got erased from memory and reality both. She’d seen Buddy flicker across a TV screen once after visiting a medium, tries researching the show, and finds nothing. She sees him again, touches the screen, and gets pulled through, fully absorbed, waking up as the show’s nurse character with zero memory of her old life. The sequence pulls double duty: explaining the mechanism by which people get trapped in the show and why nobody ever looks for them, and setting up the reveal that Grace’s missing child is one of the kids we’ve been following.

This section doesn’t quite work for me. The family scenes move too fast to actually build any connection. Topher Grace is a capable actor stuck with so little screen time you barely register he was there. It also lands right after one of the kids gets impaled fleeing Buddy, and that hard tonal swerve makes the film feel like it’s stalling rather than building. This would have been stronger sticking entirely with the kids navigating their way out, since that plotline already worked on its own and had room to go further, as noted above. The family detour feels like the writers weren’t confident they could stretch the “evil Barney” premise on its own and needed a second, weaker plotline to buy pacing room. A shame, because a much shorter version, someone briefly getting pulled into the TV and immediately becoming the nurse, would have communicated the same mechanism without this much runtime cost. As executed, it feels janky.

These same scenes also reframe how you’re meant to see Buddy going forward. Half-burned after the kids set him on fire, Buddy comes to Nurse Grace for help. She starts bandaging him, he asks for a hug, and then starts licking and groping her. This entire beat was unnecessary. Up to that point, Buddy worked purely as a needy, controlling mascot who abducts people into his own show and turns homicidal the instant anyone breaks the illusion. Adding a sexual dimension doesn’t sharpen that idea. Not scarier. Not funnier. Just an escalation that sours a genuinely fun juxtaposition, turning a killer-kids-mascot concept uncomfortable instead of unsettling in a way that actually works.

By the end, the film reveals more depth than it initially seems to promise, and I’m split on how that lands. On one hand, fleshing out this world is fun: Buddy reads as some extra-dimensional being bound by TV logic, needing the kids to sing the closing song and roll credits to reset the loop. Genuinely enjoyable stuff. On the other, Freddy running through what looks like a lab near the end raises questions the film never really answers, implying Buddy and the whole set were human-built, which I think undersells the concept. An entity that masks itself as a children’s program specifically to lure kids into a false world and siphon something off them, love, life, whatever, hits harder than “built by people who lost control of their creation.” Mileage will vary on that interpretation, but it didn’t fully click for me the way I wanted it to.

Small nitpick: the marketing leaned into Candle Cove creepypasta comparisons, a show people half-remember that seemingly never existed. Some of that DNA is here, but it’s nowhere close to that story in practice, and that mismatch was a letdown.

Another entry in 2026’s stack of “kids’ entertainment gone evil” movies that could have been better without actually being bad. Genuinely enjoyed a lot of it, and out of the recent wave chasing this specific trope, this is one of the stronger ones. 7 out of 10.