In Casper Kelly’s viral short “Too Many Cooks,” a catchy ’90s sitcom intro repeats for 11 minutes with new characters added to the name roll each time. Eventually, a serial killer looming on the edge of the frame begins hacking up the oversized cast. With Buddy, Kelly essentially expands and tweaks his “Cooks” premise into a feature format, this time within the world of ’90s children’s programming.
A mix of Barney and Blue’s Clues, the TV program Buddy follows a large pink unicorn who, alongside a supporting cast of anthropomorphized house objects, teaches the program’s children a new lesson each episode. All of the show’s elements—the colorful sets, the ’90s outfits the children wear, the songs they sing—point to Kelly’s deep understanding of the aesthetics and rules of the world that he subverts.
Buddy wastes little time setting the plot in motion. By the second episode of the show-within-a-movie, one of the kids has disappeared, and Freddy (Delaney Quinn) discovers his novel in the garbage can covered in blood. From there, the children band together and quickly uncover Buddy’s homicidal tendencies. They plot to escape the house set that, up until that point, has been their entire life and identity. Buddy leans heavily on the classic “children in peril” tool, and by murdering one of them in the very first episode, the stakes are real. Gaslighting is also deployed as a potential metaphor for child abuse, with Buddy consistently manipulating the children by telling them this was all a misunderstanding and that he’s not mad. Buddy occasionally can’t withhold his rage, and these brief moments when he lashes out break the facade of the cheery TV program. They’re well-plotted and funny.
The repeating episodic structure of the first act makes a stark jump to the real world, a VHS aesthetic swapped for contemporary digital cinematography. In this initially disconnected storyline, a suburban mother, Grace (Cristin Milioti), lives a normal life with a harmless husband (Topher Grace) and two children. But a persistent inner void leads her to conduct some fast investigative work and enlist the help of a psychic. She determines she is missing a child whose memory has been erased from both her and her family. It’s a crazy leap, but Buddy does its best to lead her to this conclusion in a concise, humorous manner. The initial disconnection of the two narratives is thus elaborated: one of these children on the run from Buddy is her missing child. A Severance quality looms large here, especially when Grace ends up in day-to-day proximity with this missing child, both possessing zero knowledge of who the other is. I Saw the TV Glow is another reference point, but where that Sundance hit played on the metaphorical quality of a ’90s TV program possibly being real, Buddy plays out the idea literally.
From an Adult Swim alum, Buddy is funny and irreverent, but its success as a feature lays in never going too far towards irony. Its central plot of a mother searching for her lost child is played mostly straight by Milioti, with some wiggle room for exceptions when the appropriate joke calls for it. Yet Kelly’s experiment has its limits. A scene in which a few characters from an off-air Western program meet the children plays like second-act filler. And by the time Buddy full-blown transforms into a monster chasing the kids around the house in its climax, the “children in peril” trick begins to wear thin. But, by and large, Buddy proves that high-concept, short-form premises can be expanded to a feature format effectively, so long as the final film isn’t too winky and its stakes feel grounded.
Buddy premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.