Buddy

Anyone who has sat in a pediatrician’s waiting room knows the particular dread of a children’s show that will not end. The songs loop, the host beams, the colors are the colors of cough syrup, and eventually a small voice in your head wonders what happens on that set after the cameras stop. Casper Kelly’s Buddy has a theory of its own, and it is darker than mine. There are no cameras and there is no set. The host of “It’s Buddy!” is an actual magical unicorn, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key with the bottomless cheer of someone who has never once heard the word “no,” and the children on his show sing, dance, learn about sharing, and are occasionally murdered.

The film opens looking like something taped in 1994 and found years later on a VHS tape in a church basement. Kelly shoots in the boxy old 1.33:1 frame at a soft, smeary resolution that passes for a telecine transfer, and when an episode ends the credits roll over the cast as they hold their smiles a beat too long, the way kids freeze for a school photographer. Then everything resets and a new episode starts.

The trouble begins when a boy named Josh declines the dance party. He has reached the age when dancing with a unicorn loses its appeal, and he would rather read his book. Buddy asks again, and then again. Kelly is careful here. Buddy isn’t a predator. He just wants tomorrow to look exactly like today, as do certain people we have all worked for, except that Buddy has godlike powers.

In the next episode Josh is gone, a girl named Hannah has his spot, and nobody mentions it. The kids are sharper than their show gives them credit for, and when they find Josh’s bloody clothes inside Trashy the Trash Can (a supporting player who I suspect has seen more than anyone on the show), they draw the obvious conclusion. Of course, Buddy must now kill to cover up the first killing, which is how things go in film noir and, it turns out, in the land of friendship songs. The children’s only hope is Charlie the Train, bound for Diamond City. You may guess for yourself whether Diamond City is as nice as it sounds.

Kelly made his name with Too Many Cooks, an Adult Swim short that repeated a sitcom opening until it curdled into a slasher film and whatever else he could think of. His method is repetition. A joke is funny the first time, tedious by the fourth, and somewhere around the ninth it becomes funny again in a way that makes you worry about yourself. Buddy plays the same trick, often successfully.

Then the film breaks out of the loop altogether and cuts to a present-day family. Cristin Milioti plays a mother named Grace, and Topher Grace plays her husband, Ben, which must have made for confusing call sheets. Grace has hired a psychic to cleanse the house. The TV switches itself on to “It’s Buddy!” Ben turns it off. Grace turns it back on and can’t find the show on any channel. At dinner she screams and says she thinks they had a third child she can’t remember. Ben tells her to calm down. Shortly afterward, a fuzzy white hand reaches out of the screen and hauls her in while Ben notices nothing, and she arrives in Buddy’s world as the show’s new nurse, the old one having been dealt with.

Milioti is very good as a woman who suspects she’s the only sane person in the room and takes no comfort in it. Topher Grace has the harder job. Ben is such a condescending lout that I spent his scenes wondering how this marriage produced two children, let alone three. Everyone else in the movie is a stereotype being taken apart for our amusement, and Ben is the one whose parts never come loose. I suspect he belonged to a subplot that ended up on the floor.

The larger problem is length. Kelly’s Adult Swim Yule Log threw in every genre he could find and a few I’m not sure exist, and all that clutter kept the loop lively. Buddy runs 96 minutes with fewer toys. It seems odd to call a movie about a murderous talking unicorn constrained, but at times it felt that way, as if the film were idling while Kelly thought up the next thing.

Still, I laughed a lot, a few times hard enough to miss the next line. If you’re on the fence, watch Too Many Cooks first. It takes eleven minutes, and your reaction to it will predict your reaction to Buddy. If you loved it, add a star to mine. If you wanted to throw your laptop, subtract two. I admired that short without falling for it, and I feel about the same toward Buddy. But I will never again hear children singing about sharing without wondering who’s missing from the back row.