Sundance 2026 Review: BUDDY Brings Childhood Horrors to Unreal Life

Barney, the anthropomorphic, purple-skinned dinosaur created in the early 1990s to “educate” preteens across several decades, traumatized them instead.

 

Or to be more accurate, traumatized the teens and adults who found themselves in a room with a Barney-loving preteen. Since then, Barney has become an object of ridicule or fun for some, possibly many, and an iconic representation of kindness and compassion for others. 

 

Even after his demise (i.e., cancellation), Barney refused to go quietly into the good night. Instead, he’s survived in reruns and an animated spinoff, Barney’s World. But for anyone to revisit the terrors of their maladjusted childhoods, co-writer/director Casper Kelly and co-writer Jamie King have the answer to your nightmares, Buddy. A darkly humorous, gruesomely visualized parody, Buddy will make you see Barney & Friends in a new, utterly horrific light.

 

An orange-skinned unicorn with a hyper-friendly disposition and a perpetual grin, Buddy just wants to be loved and appreciated as a god-like being by the wards under his charge. His unrelenting positivity goes by the wayside, however, the moment an indentured member of the cast loses interest in Buddy's activities or attempts to assert his or her agency and/or autonomy. One preteen in particular raises Buddy’s ire (he prefers reading to socializing) and disappears almost as quickly as he’s introduced. He may not have been wished into a cornfield, but it’s just as clear he won’t return for the next episode.

 

A replacement appears seconds later, minus her memory, but imbued with skin-crawling positivity almost equal to Buddy’s. It’s Freddy (Delaney Quinn), one of Buddy’s most fervent followers, who begins to doubt the Buddy-created reality she and the others live in, initially when she remembers the now-disappeared boy, later when her suspicions, shared with the show’s nurse, lead to the latter’s abrupt excision from the show and her replacement with a familiar face possibly connected to the real world outside Buddy’s show. 

 

As doubt replaces certainty, Freddy agitates for freedom from Buddy’s suffocating, dictatorial control. By necessity, the flight to freedom comes with its own risks, rewards, and much weirdness, including a Howdy Doody-inspired puppet and his monosyllabic sidekick, an underground workshop filled with mysteries and wonders, and a body count higher than expected, especially for a film, horror or otherwise, involving children.

 

Buddy (the film) mixes the hyper-stylized, unreal world of the title character with scenes drawn from a reality not dissimilar to our own. There, a woman (Cristin Milioti) can’t help but feel that something of undefined value is absent from her comfortably middle-class family life. She seems to have everything: a beautiful life, a husband (Topher Grace) who loves her, and two children (one a preteen, the other a teen), but an empty chair at the dinner table suggests something, maybe someone has been stolen from her life. 

 

Deftly balancing dark, cringe-worthy comedy with absurdist horror, Buddy delivers exactly what its primary image of a half-charred Buddy wielding an ax in an artificial forest promised: Twisted fun (not) for the whole family. The deaths are unexpectedly gory, Buddy makes for a terrifying antagonist, and Freddy, after emerging as a non-conventional “final girl,” transforms into a suitably root-worthy hero, driven by an unquenchable desire to escape Buddy’s control and assert her agency and autonomy from the Powers-That-Be (Buddy). Therein lies a lesson for our vexing social-political times.