★★★★☆
The Too Many Cooks man, Caspar Kelly, turns a Barney-shaped children’s tape into a small, sad nightmare of childhood.
Casper Kelly, whose Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks weaponised the sitcom credits sequence, widens his canvas here without losing the queasy VHS uncanny that made his name. The conceit: in 1999, a clutch of amnesiac children are trapped inside the loop of a Barney-style kids’ show, presided over by a tyrannical orange unicorn and quietly plotting escape – while in the waking world a suburban mother, Grace (Cristin Milioti), feels the same nightmare bleeding toward her.
Kelly understands the textures of both children’s television and children’s dread, the way a friendly host tips into menace when the tracking wobbles, and he mines that seam with real patience. The degraded-tape aesthetic creates a pervasive mood of anti-nostalgia, similar to The Backrooms – this is a programme half-remembered and wholly wrong. It leans into ambiguity (in ways some will find withholding) and by design grows a touch repetitive, the way a cassette worn thin does; but the repetition is that of trap closing.
Milioti anchors the human stakes with her usual bruised warmth, and the film keeps faith with the logic of a child’s imagination rather than explaining it away. For viewers who like their horror liminal and their nostalgia poisoned (e.g. the Skinamarink crowd) this is a mischievous, deeply unsettling brainworm.
Buddy played at Tubi FrightFest in London.