Release Date: Premiered at Sundance (Midnight section), January 22, 2026; wide theatrical release August 28, 2026
Runtime: 95 minutes (1h 35min)
Rated: R for bloody violence, some drug content, language
Production Companies: BoulderLight Pictures, Low Spark Films, Sipur Studios, Substance
Producers: Tyler Davidson, J.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules, Drew Sykes, Tracy Rosenblum
Cinematography: Zach Kuperstein
Editing: Josh Ethier, ACE
Music/Composer: Michael Yezerski
Buddy (2026)
Director: Casper Kelly
Writers: Casper Kelly & Jamie King
Cast: Cristina Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Sergey Zhurvasky (Buddy suit performer/motion capture), Michael Shannon, Patton Oswalt, Clint Howard, Eric Bauza, Jonathan Yurco, Rachel Appelbaum, Caleb Williams, Tristan Borders, Luke Speakman, Madison Skyy Polan
There’s a particular kind of dread reserved for the shows we grew up trusting completely — the ones that told us, in that saccharine sing-song cadence, that they’d be our friend until the end. Casper Kelly’s feature debut doesn’t just poke at that memory. It kicks the door open on what might have actually been happening just off-camera the whole time.
Analog horror is having a real moment in film right now — you can feel it in something like Backrooms and the built-in online audience that style now carries with it into theaters. Kelly’s Buddy borrows that same aesthetic language to resurrect the specific nostalgia of ’90s kids’ programming — your Barney & Friends, your primary-colored, felt-and-foam wholesomeness — and then does something cleverer than simple parody with it. Threaded between the lines of this film is a pointed commentary on the traumatic, exploitative machinery that children have historically been fed into on set, and on how much damage a show’s “star” can inflict on everyone orbiting him once he realizes just how much power he actually holds.
We open inside an artificial world: It’s Buddy!, a forgotten 1999 children’s television show hosted by a seemingly calm — at first — orange unicorn named Buddy. He’s flanked by his co-host, Betty Bunny, and a small cast of child actors: Freddy (Delaney Quinn), Wade (Caleb Williams), Josh (Luke Speakman), and Oliver (Tristan Borders). Rounding out the set are the requisite inanimate objects brought to life, as these shows love to do — Mr. Mailbox, Couchy the Couch, Clocky the Clock, Strappy the Backpack, Charlie the Train — alongside two human adult performers, Mailman Miles and Nurse Nancy.
Buddy’s patience gets tested almost immediately when Josh starts defying direction, opting to read his YA novel instead of playing along. It costs him his spot on the show — he disappears, quietly replaced by newcomer Hannah (Madison Skyy Polan) — and it isn’t long before Freddy stumbles on Josh’s book in the trash, soaked in blood. That discovery sends her down a much more inquisitive, much more dangerous path, one that has her questioning everything about Buddy and the world they’re all trapped inside.
From there, Kelly starts weaving the timeline, cutting between the show’s world and the present day, where Grace (Cristin Milioti) — a mother in the middle of what looks like a full unraveling — becomes convinced she’s missing a third child, one that doesn’t show up anywhere in her family’s official history. Her digging causes real friction at home, especially with her husband, Ben (Topher Grace), who wants no part of whatever she thinks she’s uncovering.
What makes the film land, though, is what it’s really about underneath the puppetry and the primary colors: Buddy’s set is a stand-in for every exploitative children’s-entertainment production that’s ever existed, and Buddy himself is a stand-in for the adults who don’t just exploit children’s labor but do far worse to them. None of this is subtext pulled from thin air — it’s barely even subtext at all, given how many former child stars have come forward in the last several years about what actually happened to them behind the scenes. Kelly is clearly working through something real here, and he’s not being coy about it.
The way Kelly stages the fallout is genuinely effective. Josh is, unsurprisingly, the first to go — and it’s worth noting what he was doing instead of playing along: reading, retreating into something more suited to the teenage or “young adult” years these kids are visibly aging out of the show’s grip toward. His replacement, Hannah, becomes the film’s bluntest piece of commentary all on her own — proof of just how disposable a child actor is in a system like this one, reduced to nothing more than a warm body unless she’s willing to hand over her power completely.
Tonally, the film leans into camp when it wants to, and it earns the indulgence — the world Kelly builds is meticulously designed, immersive enough that the boundary between the nostalgic set and the “real” world outside it feels genuinely load-bearing rather than decorative. That opening stretch does a lot of quiet work establishing the show’s rhythms before the darker material starts bleeding in, and the effect mirrors something the film is clearly aware of: the way former child performers — and former child viewers, now adults themselves — tend to look back and only gradually clock how dark their experience actually was.
There’s some genuinely fun kill work here too, and while plenty of it lands on the human cast, just as much — if not more — plays out through the sentient set pieces, which keeps things from tipping fully into grim territory while still holding onto the film’s central perspective: a child’s-eye view of what’s unfolding around them. The “adultifying” of a kids’-show aesthetic isn’t a new trick — we’ve seen it plenty of times before — but where Kelly separates himself is in making Buddy an unchecked, all-powerful force. Nobody’s safe. Not the kids, not the adults, not even his own sentient co-stars.
You can feel Kelly’s fingerprints from Too Many Cooks all over this — that same appetite for letting something familiar curdle in real time — but Buddy carries a lot more of his own reflection on the shows he actually grew up watching. It’s a two-birds-one-stone move: he’s not just building a horror-comedy, he’s building commentary on an entertainment industry that chews through children against their will, and that can end in the ruin of not just their lives and careers, but their parents’ too — even those who were cashing in right alongside the people exploiting their kids.
By the time the credits roll, Buddy has done what the best entries in this specific “corrupted mascot” subgenre are supposed to do: it’s dressed real horror up in vibrant, familiar colors and dared you to keep smiling at it anyway. I won’t spoil how it all shakes out — that’s part of the fun, and originality is doing a lot of heavy lifting here that deserves to be experienced blind. But even against a small wave of recent films chasing similar territory, Buddy separates itself through sheer boldness of thought — commentary that, unfortunately, tracks a little too closely with real situations happening right now. That Buddy-shaped hole in your childhood memory? Kelly just showed you exactly what was living in it.