Brigs­by Bear

This is the sto­ry of an emo­tion­al­ly stunt­ed thir­tysome­thing who can only con­cep­tu­alise the world around him through cul­tur­al iconog­ra­phy, which might make it sound like it’s a seri­ous work about a film crit­ic. Instead, it’s an off-kil­ter, open-heart­ed comedy.

For decades, James (Kyle Mooney, also co-writer) has lived with his sup­posed par­ents (Mark Hamill, Jane Adams) in a seclud­ed bunker. He was kid­napped from hos­pi­tal as a baby and raised with no con­nec­tion to the out­side world. His every wak­ing thought is con­sumed by edu­ca­tion­al sci-fi series Brigs­by Bear Adven­tures. Unbe­known to James, all 700 plus episodes of the show, and some mer­chan­dise, were pro­duced by his cap­tors, who used it to instil cer­tain val­ues into the lad, such as how curios­i­ty is an unnat­ur­al emo­tion and how fre­quent­ly one should mas­tur­bate. Think Bar­ney & Friends writ­ten while high(er).

About 10 min­utes into the film, James is res­cued by the author­i­ties, who explain his abduc­tion and return him to his bio­log­i­cal par­ents (Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins). Amid his uncom­fort­able dis­cov­er­ies of the real world is the real­i­sa­tion that no one else knows of Brigs­by, and that the show’s non­sense mythol­o­gy will nev­er be con­clud­ed with its mak­er now impris­oned. Neglect­ing his real family’s attempts at bond­ing, James becomes obsessed with mak­ing his own fea­ture film conclusion.

SNL vet­er­an Dave McCary large­ly man­ages the dif­fi­cult bal­anc­ing act between earnest emo­tion­al trau­ma and sil­ly com­e­dy, though it nev­er tru­ly embraces this latent dark streak. Every time the script flirts with psy­cho­log­i­cal pathos, atten­tion is quick­ly whisked away to more cliché́d Amer­i­can indie tropes, with James assem­bling and inspir­ing a rag­tag crew – like some aspir­ing actor-detec­tive – to pull off his dream while fol­low­ing their own. For all the film’s cel­e­bra­tion of imag­i­na­tion as a tool for escape, the tra­jec­to­ry it fol­lows is too uninspired.