‘Buddy’ turns nostalgia into a bloody nightmare

The Keegan-Michael Key-voiced Buddy—a fluffy, heavy-set orange unicorn with a bunny for an assistant—plays ringmaster to a ‘90s afterschool series. On the program, a diverse group of children learns about love and togetherness, with the help of anthropomorphized objects, like a backpack voiced by Patton Oswalt, and occasional adult visitors like the chipper Mailman Miles (Bennie Taylor) and the kindly Nurse Nancy (Phuong Kubacki). It’s part PBS’s Barney & Friends, and part Nickelodeon fare like Dora and Blue’s Clues, with some nostalgic hints of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Everything is upbeat and candy colored in this videotaped, 4:3 throwback world, whose pink pastels are made ever-so-eerie by the fuzzy glow of an old CRT TV set. We see a couple of short episodes play out in full, end credits and all, but things start to go subtly awry when one of the child characters, Josh (Luke Speakman), refuses to participate in a coordinated dance, necessitating his replacement by newcomer Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan).

Buddy reassures the kids that Josh is on vacation, but one of them, Freddy (Delaney Quinn), begins alerting the others to macabre clues about his fate. This results in violent reprisals from Buddy—which he tries to sweep under the rug—but eventually, the movie takes a sharp left turn back into the real world, to focus on a different set of characters. This more modern, wide-screen setting (with its darker color grading) finds the childlike texture stripped away in favor of adult problems, like the mundanity of work meetings over Zoom, and lingering feelings you can’t quite name. Grace (Cristin Milioti) and her husband Ben (Topher Grace), the parents to two sons, live an ordinary life, until Grace starts to be plagued by invisible, ghostly sensations, and eventually by her TV, which turns on to play Buddy’s show seemingly at random.

However, the intentional dissonance between these worlds—which, as you might expect, eventually become connected—isn’t quite paid off in satisfying ways, even once Grace mysteriously ends up inside the TV show. While both halves of Buddy begin with horrors swept under the rug (in one case visceral, in the other, psychological), the actual lore that ends up binding them is a bit mundane and self-contained. Despite exploring the edges of the real world, the movie isn’t really about anything recognizable or relatable except its own plot—but don’t let that deter you entirely. It’s a pretty decent time, even if your level of enjoyment depends on how funny you find the contrast between bubblegum façades and vicious gore.

From left, Delaney Quinn as Freddy, Madison Skyy Polan as Hannah, and Cristin Milioti as Grace in "Buddy."

Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Saban Films

The child actors are mostly a delight as well, especially Quinn and Skyy Polan, whose expressive enthusiasm within the show’s fiction gives way to the kind of razor-sharp fear and trauma characteristic of a much more serious film. That’s not a knock against Buddy; if anything, its young cast is an asset and a secret weapon, providing meaningful balance when the movie either gets repetitive in its imagery, or too locked into its own lore, without any context for what might make such a specifically post-modern concept attractive to a modern audience.

There are hints, at times, of something political lurking beneath the surface—Buddy, for instance, is an orange-skinned TV personality with a swoop of blond hair who reveals himself pervy and monstrous; sound familiar?—but beyond a point, the entire joke becomes about stretching a concept or genre to its breaking point. This worked in Kelly’s famous 2014 online sketch Too Many Cooks (a creepy send-up of ‘80s sitcom theme songs), but the viral sensation’s excess was contained within a dozen minutes. Buddy, by contrast, just doesn’t have the imagination to sustain a 96-minute feature. Then again, it has its moments, and it sure as hell seemed fun to make, especially for the kids who get to be involved with some delightful practical effects. That has to be worth something.