‘Buddy’ Unleashes Messy, Singular, Killer Unicorn Madness [Sundance 2026 Review]

Buddy is exactly the kind of deranged late night movie you would expect from Casper Kelly, a cult figure whose reputation was fortified by his viral Adult Swim segment Too Many Cooks. That infamous project was not just funny, but genuinely repulsive, an uncanny hell-comedy that expertly rots its humor into something oddly sinister. With his feature-length directorial debut premiering in the Midnight section of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Kelly presents a film that gestures toward that same creeping uncanniness, but instead favors a more casual, colorful, and less affective kind of fun.

The premise is pure Kelly insanity. A group of children trapped inside a lost vintage television program are guided, or hunted, by Buddy, a giant orange unicorn with big Barney energy and a rapidly growing body count. Adults, kids, and puppets alike are slaughtered with manic cartoonish rage, the violence pitched somewhere between slapstick and literal nightmare. It is outrageous, mean, and regularly funny, even if it never quite establishes the sustained danger or suffocating unease that made Too Many Cooks feel so transgressive. This time, Kelly seems more interested in having fun than making us squirm, and that is a tradeoff I can live with.

Running parallel to the children’s blood-soaked television purgatory is a more grounded storyline in which Cristin Milioti plays a suburban mother who becomes psychically entangled with Buddy’s world and the kids fighting to survive it. It is here that Buddy begins to wobble. Milioti is a reliable presence, but the character is somewhat unfulfilled, and her performance comes across as a satellite compared to the wildness of the youngster ensemble. These kids, by contrast, are almost too real, so earnest and fully inhabited that they blur the line between satire and sincerity in a way that proves far more compelling.