Casper Kelly's horror film "Buddy" initially presents itself as a sketch-comedy-style game with escalating variations, reminiscent of his earlier work "Too Many Cooks." However, the film takes an unexpected and sinister turn, diverging from a meticulously crafted imitation of 1980s and 1990s sitcom credit sequences to mimic a lower-rent version of "Barney & Friends." Over three sample "episodes" of the show-within-a-film, titled "It's Buddy!," the seemingly cheerful Buddy, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key, becomes increasingly threatening.
The movie's cinematic release, with its presentation in a TV-style aspect ratio and video texture, creates a deliberate dissonance on the big screen, telegraphing the film's eventual pivot. After the "episodes" become more disturbing and glitchy, with child cast members being killed and others attempting to escape, the film shifts to what is presented as the "real" world. This new reality is depicted with a more cinematic aspect ratio and a polished look, which paradoxically registers as less artificial.
In this "real" world, the audience meets Grace (Cristin Milioti), who lives with her husband (Topher Grace) and two sons. Grace begins to experience unsettling episodes, feeling that something is missing from her life. She becomes convinced that a third child, a daughter, is missing from their home and that no one else remembers her. Her unease intensifies when she encounters an episode of "It's Buddy!" on television and cannot find any evidence of the show's existence. She is eventually pulled into the show, where she is recast as one of the characters who has been killed by Buddy. She also realizes that Freddy (Delaney Quinn), one of the children who previously tried to escape Buddy, is actually her daughter from the real world, whose presence has been forgotten by everyone.
Following an escape attempt in the "It's Buddy!" world, where the forest outside Buddy's fences leads nowhere, Freddy and the other children are reset back into Buddy's house. Grace, now playing the show's nurse, aids the children in another escape attempt and sacrifices herself. Freddy leads the remaining children down a well on the show's set, which opens into a prop room and a mysterious facility. By this point, Buddy has killed the other children, and Freddy discovers numerous televisions broadcasting "It's Buddy!" to children in their homes. The apparent goal of the show is to draw these children into the TV sets, erasing their memories and making them casting fodder, mirroring what happened to Grace.
After Freddy ultimately dispatches Buddy, she finds a television displaying an empty room and jumps through it to return to the real world. However, the ending leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar place, with a man speaking Spanish asking who she is. Her puppet companions, Strappy the Backpack and Mr. Mailbox, revert to their non-speaking object forms. Her mother, Grace, has been killed back in the world of "It's Buddy!." It remains unclear whether Freddy fully remembers her old family life, though returning to the real world presumably would bring back those memories.
The film's conclusion, while logically consistent with horror movie tropes of the "Final Girl" escaping immediate danger but not necessarily returning home, has been described as anticlimactic. After presenting a surprisingly emotional storyline beneath its "Barney & Friends" parody, focusing on a mother's supernatural, media-driven gaslighting and her reunion with her lost child, the ending of Freddy escaping immediate danger but remaining stranded in the real world feels like a "big shrug." It suggests a clever extension of a horror premise for the film's entire runtime, but the ending itself does not invite much thought or reflection on the film's use of kiddie-show iconography, horror tropes, or its narrative fusion. The ending offers little room for interpretation, possibly reflecting a satirist's self-imposed limits within disposable television formats.