Casper Kelly’s horror movie Buddy starts as a pitch-perfect parody of a low-rent, Barney-like kids’ show. It ends with a child jumping through a TV portal into a strange room, where a man asks her, in Spanish, who she is.
The story concludes with Freddy, the girl who has just slain the monstrous Buddy, now safe from any immediate peril. Yet she remains isolated, far from her home, with her mother having perished within the realm of the television.
Keegan-Michael Key plays the lead role, while Cristin Milioti takes on the part of Grace in this feature. The picture respects its own conventions throughout, yet the conclusion fails to impress after 90 minutes of increasingly inventive frights. What follows is a rundown of the story and the significance of the closing moments, including spoilers.
Three Episodes of It’s Buddy!
Buddy opens with three full “episodes” of It’s Buddy!, a fictional children’s program that mimics the look and feel of 1990s PBS staples like Barney and Friends. The show is rendered in a TV-style aspect ratio and video texture that look deliberately dissonant on a movie theater screen.
The episodes begin with a cheerful, repetitive sketch-comedy-style game of variations. But then the tone shifts and turns sinister. Buddy grows more threatening with each episode. Children are killed, and the footage glitches. The fake show’s reality begins to break down.
The director of the Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks stays in this world long enough for the change to be felt. Once three unsettling episodes have passed, the film shifts into the “real” world, shot in a wider, more cinematic aspect ratio with a more polished appearance. That version comes across as the less staged choice.
Grace Finds a Missing Daughter
We first encounter Grace (Cristin Milioti), who resides with her husband (Topher Grace) and their two sons in a perfect suburban home. However, she experiences episodes where she feels that something is missing from her life.
She grows certain that a third child, a daughter, has vanished from their household, a presence that no one else recalls. Grace is further unsettled when she comes across an episode of It’s Buddy!, and finds no trace that the program ever existed at all.
She is drawn into the show later on, cast as one of the characters Buddy has already killed. It is then that she recalls the truth: Freddy (Delaney Quinn), one of the children who attempted to escape Buddy earlier, is actually her daughter from the real world. Every person in Grace’s life has forgotten Freddy exists.
The Well Leads to a Facility
The It’s Buddy! world, Freddy and the other children who escaped with her discover the forest outside Buddy’s fences lead nowhere. The characters Buddy has semi-secretly killed return to Buddy’s house in an episode-style reset, along with new replacements.
Grace, now playing the show’s nurse, helps the children attempt another escape. She sacrifices herself in the process. Freddy leads the remaining children down a well on the show’s set.
A prop room and a strange building lie at the end of the well. The other children have already died at the hands of a hurt Buddy. Freddy finds a collection of televisions showing It’s Buddy! being sent into the homes of children.
The show’s obvious purpose appears to be drawing kids into the TV screens, wiping their memories, and turning them into material for casting on the show. This is what befell Grace. Freddy puts Buddy out of commission for good. After that, she discovers a television watching over an empty room and leaps through it to bring herself back to the real world.
A Stranger Asks Who She Is
The ending comes at roughly the 90-minute mark, a short while before the film concludes. At that point, Freddy passes through the portal, and the puppet friends who had traveled with her — Strappy the Backpack and Mr. Mailbox — revert to their ordinary, silent forms.
The opening move is familiar. The next turn, however, breaks from expectation without delivering much comfort. A man walks into the space and addresses her directly, speaking in Spanish, asking who she is.
Freddy is far from her original home now, no matter where she has ended up. Her mother was killed back in the world of It’s Buddy! The question of whether Freddy still holds any memory of her old family life remains open; returning to the real world might bring those memories back eventually, although that outcome is not certain.
A Logical But Flat Finale
It makes perfect sense that the story ends with Freddy turning into a child version of the horror-movie Final Girl. A television portal would not simply return her to her own home without further consequence.
But the movie had located a surprisingly emotional, affecting storyline beneath the parody of Barney & Friends. It involved Grace’s reality-bending reconnection with her lost child, with the thorny symbolism of a woman subsuming herself in a sinister children’s TV show to rescue the kid she lost to it.
The film leaves Freddy alive yet marooned in the real world, and it feels like a shrug rather than a payoff. The movie seems to call “time!” on itself after spending its whole runtime building clever extensions of a premise that was always only one joke.
Buddy does not end on a cop-out. It plays fair with the established world. But it does not particularly invite much thought about its clever use of kiddie-show iconography, horror tropes, or the fusion of two narratives: a child’s adventure inverted into terror and a mother’s ennui revealed to be supernatural, media-driven gaslighting.
Theatrical Run and Home Release
The film Buddy remains on the big screen right now, and it has managed something unusual: a rare second-weekend increase at the box office. That performance suggests the movie will probably stay out of homes for quite some time yet, likely several weeks at minimum.
A home release timed to Halloween works well, since it puts Buddy costumes right in step with the parties where they’re most likely to appear.
What the movie asks is straightforward: will the children get away from the TV monster?
Freddy manages to get away from the monster, killing Buddy in the process before jumping through the portal. Still, being free of danger does not mean she has reached safety. She comes down in a place she does not know, without any family, without any friends, and without a clear way back home.
Buddy kills the other children, leaving Freddy as the only one left alive. Freddy survives to become the Final Girl of a children’s show turned into a nightmare.
The woman does not get away either. She gives up her life so the children might live. What she gets for it is death within the fabricated realm of It’s Buddy!, the same medium that wiped her daughter from existence.
Freddy survives the film’s conclusion, though she has lost her footing entirely. The man who discovers her speaks Spanish, which hints that she may have ended up far from her suburban American home. The movie offers no answers about where she is, what the man hopes to achieve, or whether Freddy will manage to return home.
Freddy has exchanged a monster for a void, and the terror is done, though the price is complete. The film’s ingenuity lasted for 90 minutes, yet the finale fails to carry that wit forward. Instead, it brings the game to an end without sealing the victory.
- Cast: Keegan-Michael Key as Buddy, Cristin Milioti as Grace, Topher Grace as the husband, Delaney Quinn as Freddy
- Runtime: Roughly 90 minutes
- Availability: In theaters now; home release expected around Halloween
- Previous work: Kelly also directed the Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks
Source: decider.com
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