Sundance 2026 Review: THE MUSICAL Brings the Comedy and the Cringe in Equal Measure

Move over, Tim Robinson. You too, Nathan Fielder. Tim Heidecker, consider yourself on notice.

 

There’s a new contender for the cringe-comedy throne. Said contender isn’t a writer-director-actor, but writer Alexander Heller, director Giselle Bonilla, actor Will Brill, and The Musical, a cringe-comedy equal to any of the sub-genre’s illustrious — and not so illustrious — predecessors. 

 

Brill stars as Doug, a failed playwright who teaches theater at a middle school. Heart shattered by a now-ended relationship with another teacher, Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), the emotionally maladjusted Doug begins a darkly comic journey to the dark side when he spots Abigail with his replacement, Principal Brady (Rob Lowe), getting over-familiar with each other on school grounds. It infuriates an already unbalanced Doug and sets him on a path with only one destination, self-immolation, likely in the most public, humiliating manner.

 

Already bitter at a life filled with setbacks and disappointment, seething with resentment and grievance, Doug hatches an (im)perfect plan: Swapping out the middle school’s approved musical, West Side Story, for an entirely new one centered on 9-11 and written in a fit of self-righteous pique by Doug himself. When it inevitably plays out, the boundary- and taboo-breaking aftermath echoes Mel Brooks’ The Producers, minus the kitsch and half the camp.

 

But before he can put on the new musical, Doug has to overcome several obstacles, including Brady, a smug, insincere, virtue-signaling bureaucrat; Abigail, who wants to assuage her guilt at their breakup by offering her hand in friendship; and at least one devious middle-schooler unhappy about losing the lead role in the musical to her rival.

 

The previous description, though, doesn’t do justice to The Musical. No plot description could. It's filled with black, bordering on bleak, humor, ludicrous bordering on absurd plot turns, and a pitch-perfect performance by Brill as the self-destructive Doug. Twisting words and thoughts (via voice-over narration) into justification for his actions, Doug can’t help himself. Even when his actions have the opposite effect, he just doubles down, somehow imagining the next effort to prove or redeem himself.

 

Heller obviously knows his way around, in, and through cringe-comedy, specifically an earnest, reality-denying, doomed-to-fail protagonist. His flaws make him human. His open-air failures make him, however, the subject of derision or ridicule. Audiences can relate, but only to a point: Identification, sympathy, or even empathy end where the protagonist sabotages himself. Humor comes from laughing at and sometimes laughing with the protagonist, but usually at arm’s length. Better the protagonist suffer onscreen for the audience’s amusement than the opposite. 

 

Elevated by Bonilla’s assured, synced-in direction (she repeatedly favors over-dramatic push-ins for seriocomic effect) and Matteo Rossa’s deliberately overwrought, over-emphatic, borderline horror score, The Musical undoubtedly will make a fine addition to the collections of cringe-comedy aficionados.