Buddy is the best thing to happen to children’s television

Buddy · Dir. Casper Kelly · Roadside Attractions / Saban Films · In theaters now

Anyone who watched daytime children’s programming in the nineties already knows the exact texture this film is working with. The over-lit set. The host addressing the camera with an intensity nobody questioned at the time. The songs that repeat one phrase until it stops meaning anything. Casper Kelly did not have to invent the unease. He just had to stop looking away from it.

Children are trapped inside It’s Buddy!, hosted by an orange unicorn who turns violent. Cristin Milioti plays Grace, an adult pulled into the show who ends up fighting alongside them. Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy, and the casting is perfect, because Key can hold a warm broadcast voice steady while the words coming out of it get worse.

Kelly earned this

Kelly made Too Many Cooks, eleven minutes of sitcom credits that curdled into something people were still arguing about weeks later. The worry going into a feature was always whether that trick stretches. It does, because the joke was never the trick. Kelly understands that children’s television is built on relentless enforced cheer, and that enforced cheer is a form of control. Once you see the format that way, the horror writes itself.

Milioti is doing the hardest work here. She has to react like an adult who knows this is wrong while everyone around her operates on show logic, and she never tips into winking at the audience. Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt and Topher Grace fill out the adult cast, with Delaney Quinn as Freddy anchoring the kids.

Where it stands

87% on Rotten Tomatoes, 67 on Metacritic, $5.5 million domestic. It premiered at Sundance in January and sat until late August, which is a long wait for a film this assured. Go see it in a theater if you still can. A room full of people recognizing the same childhood at the same moment adds something a living room cannot.