German political theorist Hannah Arendt warned of the banality of evil back in 1963, but co-writer/director Casper Kelly revels in the evil of banality in this anarchic horror-comedy, which uses the inane world of (young) children’s television as a backdrop to an ingenious slasher movie.
If the name sounds familiar, Kelly went viral in 2014 with Too Many Cooks, a jaw-dropping 11-minute short that, similarly, featured the what-if — and WTF — scenario of TV sitcom characters becoming sentient and finding themselves at the mercy of a serial killer. Kelly plays with form in ways that some might find exasperating, but there is always a method to his madness and, like Too Many Cooks, Buddy goes out on a psychedelic high, like an extraordinary experiment in mind control.
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The beginning will be familiar to admirers of Kelly’s work, since it takes place entirely in the world of a 1999 TV show called Buddy. Watched over by an over-friendly orange plushie — “He’s a unicorn from a magic land!” — it’s a gentle, pastel-hued idyll where, for example, a purple dinosaur might live; Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood-meets-Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The kids there look to Buddy for guidance, summoning him whenever they need help and singing songs with him about the basic courtesies of suburban American life. There is a glitch in the matrix, however; a boy named Josh tries to opt out of the anodyne fun, refusing to attend Buddy’s dance party and demanding to be left alone to read his YA book, A Wrinkle in Reality. “I hate you,” he says, to Buddy’s horror.
The show restarts, as it will several times, and in the next episode, exuberant new girl Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan) arrives. While Hannah leads a song and dance, Freddy (Delaney Quinn) finds Josh’s book in the trash (like everything else in the show, the trash can has eyes and talks). As she points out to her friend Wade (Caleb “C.J” Williams), it appears to be covered in blood. Buddy insists that Josh has gone to live in nearby Diamond City and that the stains are actually red paint that his assistant Betty Bunny spilled while making Josh a leaving card. Betty Bunny denies the allegations, so Freddy takes the mystery to Nurse Nancy (Phuong Kubacki), who confronts Buddy.
Witnessing Nurse Nancy’s brutal murder is all the evidence Freddy and Wade need to conclude that Buddy is having a psychotic meltdown and make plans to leave for Diamond City. The only way out is through the nearby park, which the children are afraid to go through since always Buddy has maintained that it is populated by monsters. But with Buddy turning his violent rage toward the benign likes of Mr. Mailbox and Charlie the Train, all bets are suddenly off.
Just as the conceit threatens to become overwhelming, the film flips a switch, moving from the gaudy, analog-TV box-ratio of the show-within-the-movie to the present day, where Grace (Cristin Milioti) lives with her husband Ben (Topher Grace) and their two sons. One night, at the dinner table, Grace experiences a sense of “icy cold” dread, and, to her husband’s exasperation, brings in a parapsychologist (Brooke Blum), who conducts a séance with the family. This inexplicably causes the TV to come on in another room, showing an episode of Buddy — a show that, as Grace soon learns, might not actually exist.
What does Buddy want with Grace? This is the meat of the movie, which from hereon out becomes a enigmatic scavenger hunt, a trail of clues that lead to a place outside both the real world and the TV world. Like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, it’s about what television means to us — how much we invest in what’s clearly fake, not what it actually is. On a metaphorical level, it deals with growing up, too, and the baseline of the film is that Freddy and Wade are simply getting too old for this shit. On a murkier level, it might also be a comment on the exploitative nature of having children play-act in these fantasy worlds, and the recent Nickelodeon scandal comes uncomfortably to mind.
Key to its success are two of the main performers — Milioti as Grace and Quinn as Freddy — who give so much to the film that, after a while, the laughs fade out, and you stop noticing the voice cameos from the likes of Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt. The ending is a headscratcher but in the best possible, almost Lynchian way, hinting at dark, existential riddles that stay longer in the mind than its crowd-pleasing moments of gross-out comedy.
Title: Buddy
Festival: Sundance (Midnight)
Sales: Worry Well Productions
Director: Casper Kelly
Screenwriters: Casper Kelly, Jamie King
Cast: Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt
Running time: 1 hr 35 mins
