2026 Sundance Film Festival Movie Review: Buddy

Every year at Sundance, there is a feature film that would have benefited more from being a short. The film has a great idea and starts strongly, but towards the end of the second act and almost the entire third act, it runs out of steam, and the once-great idea for a film sputters to the finish line. At the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, that film was Casper Kelly’s delirious midnight romp, Buddy.

Kelly introduces us to a TV show, It’s Buddy, a ‘90s kids show that is a mix of Barney & Friends and Pee Wee’s Playhouse, formatted on screen in a 4:3 aspect ratio, as if we were watching it on a tube TV. Buddy (voiced marvelously by Keegan Michael-Key) is a large, orange, stuffed unicorn who is surrounded by talking inanimate objects to teach several children life lessons and sings songs. They live in a magical playland where everything is perfect every day. But when one of the children defies Buddy, it brings out a darker side of Buddy and ultimately reveals that if you don’t follow his rules, he’ll turn into a psychopathic killer. This sends the children in the show on a mission to get away from Buddy, which requires leaving Buddy’s village and going on a Wizard of Oz-like journey through the woods to get out of this world.

I loved the first half hour of Buddy. Kelly introduces us to this bright, make-believe world with a lavish set, hilarious songs, and an orange menace at the center. The child actors are pitch-perfect in delivering their corny lines and do a magnificent job of turning on the switch to real emotion when they realize Buddy is psychotic. The violence is gory, insane, and shocking the first few times we see it, but also darkly hilarious. If we had lived in this world the entire film, Buddy would have been a great success.

Kelly, however, changes the aspect ratio to the standard 1.85:1 and brings us into the real world, where we meet Grace (Cristin Milioti), a housewife on the verge of a breakdown because she keeps seeing visions that she has a missing child, despite her husband (Topher Grace) and other children having no idea what she is talking about. When Grace sees an episode of It’s Buddy on TV late at night, she gets pulled into the show, in one of the movie’s best moments. Grace becomes the nurse in the It’s Buddy village, after Buddy killed the original one, but soon joins the children in trying to escape this horrifying playland. I like Milioti as an actress, but Grace and everything she was doing in the movie felt forced to fill time. Her journey was never interesting, and it took away from the central plot of the children running away from Buddy and learning about the fictitious world they live in. There might be another interesting movie with Milioti’s character, but it didn’t fit into this one. It slowed the movie’s pace and humor quite a bit.

Buddy is pretty straightforward: when it is focused on a serial-killing stuffed unicorn going on a murdering rampage of the children, it’s entertaining, darkly funny, and violent. When it’s focused on Grace, it doesn’t work. Luckily, Buddy is mostly the former, and if you took out the entirety of Grace’s story, it would have been a spectacular midnight short.

Buddy played in the Midnight category at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

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