Tribeca Review: 'Breeder' Brings All the Cuck-Boys To Its Yard

A horror movie for those few and proud of us who remain all these decades on just a little bit obsessed with the Hulk Poodle as seen in Ang Lee’s much-maligned 2003 Hulk movie, writer-director Alex Goyette’s Breeder is a funny and terrifying Franken-freak-out for our age; one that bridges the gap between Best in Show and The Boys from Brazil that we never imagined needed bridging. It’s also—if one dons one’s Humorless Scold cap for a moment, which has admittedly been getting donned a lot this past couple of years—kind of queer-phobic. But we’ll get to all of that fun humorless scolding soon enough—buckle up now, is all I’m saying.

And if you didn’t hear enough about dying bee populations during Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia last year then also buckle up for plenty more of that particular buzzing, because Breeder’s as obsessed with what that ecological bee-tastrophe would spell for our future as was Jesse Plemons there. Leading man Russell (Daniel Doheny) is kind of a Plemons-lite actually—he’s Plemons with the bonafides, as his science is real and not a psycho manifesto of internet conspiracies and hallucinations. Although given how stupidly naive Russell ends up being perhaps he’d have done better to dig into some Lanthimosian cynicism.

Unfortunately for Russell neither the sagest nor the insanest amongst us could ever see a character like Patti (Glee star Dot-Marie Jones) coming. See, Russell needs funding for his supposedly-ingenious plan to save the bee colonies, but unfortunately his crippling anxiety has forced him to drop out of M.I.T. before he could secure his PhD. And ain’t nobody offering thousands of dollars in grants to random dudes, even ones with big ideas. And financial desperation (not to mention a whiff of a god complex) will lead even the wisest person down some questionable paths. And hey, whaddya know—that’s just where Patti lives. At the deepest darkest end of a questionable path. With lots of strange mounds of dirt out in back.

Patti’s a poodle-breeder whose mad skills with canine genetics won her a “Best in Breed” trophy at Westminster awhile back—don’t believe her? She’ll show you the video. Twice. Of course that’s a runner-up prize, but maybe don’t mention that. One day a letter from Patti arrives in Russell’s mailbox—a letter of awe-struck compliments for his bee-saving thesis, which she’s somehow gotten her eyes onto. Oh and there’s also a check for several thousand dollars in the envelope, with promises of full funding to come if Russell agrees to one little thing. She just wants him to come meet her for dinner out at her secluded farmhouse. To, you know, talk science and such. No big whoop. Why what could possibly ever go wrong?

Russell’s crunchy-granola-type girlfriend Haley (Tanaya Beatty) has some suggestions as to that. But he doesn’t see any other route to get where he wants to get (especially with Haley’s fire-breathing mother breathing fire down his neck) and so he hops in his car and immediately books it out to Patti’s place, conveniently just a few short hours of a drive away. And what he finds there… is an old dirty joke?

You know the one about the farmer with several gorgeous daughters? Actually there’s an entire industry of those jokes, parodied from Hee Haw to Ti West’s X, but the set-up’s never been quite as unsettling as it is here on Patti’s homestead. She’s basically got herself a small army of beautiful buxom blonds out there puttering about the farm with her, all of them cartoonishly eyeing Russell up and down the moment he steps foot onto their home, home on the range. The male ego being what it is he takes this attention in blushing-bride stride though, a fait accompli really, even if geeky meek Russell’s not exactly popping off the charts in the masculine feast for the eyes department.

Patti’s twice his size really, a fact that Goyette’s film can’t remind us of enough as her linebacker figure looms over and swallows willowy little Russell whole in every frame they share. And if you’re at all familiar with the the six-foot-three actor Dot-Marie Jones, a real-world arm-wrestling World Champion fifteen times over, you know she’s almost always cast due to her formidable presence—on Glee she played Coach Shannon Bieste (pronounced “Beast” natch) who eventually (problematically in retrospect) transitioned to Coach Sheldon Bieste before that show finally, thankfully flew off its rails.

Basically it’s clear from the moment they meet that Patti could twist Russell into a human pretzel if she got her mind made that that’s what she needed, and the film milks a whole lotta humor from Rusell sputtering and whimpering around her. Our boy be modern cuck personified. And yet here he is, seemingly the only man for miles, being eyed up and down by Patti’s bevy of young beauties? It’s almost like Patti might have alternative intentions for getting lil’ Russell and his big ol’ head full of brilliant genes out here onto her farm, bee colonies be damned. And the film’s gonna tell you all about it, stud.

I’m assuming I’ve dropped enough thunderous clues here as to where Breeder is heading at this point to save you from further spoilers; I mean, the title alone. Needless to say Dot-Marie Jones is very clearly having the time of her life in this role, and she’s given multiple angles to play—Patti isn’t a one-note-villain, as much as her shadow might cast that same note over and over. And the push-pull of this nightmare everybody can see coming and yet nobody can seem to stop out of selfishness and greed and sheer stupidity is a whole lot of fun in her hands. And Doheny is also very funny; the two of them really do make for a killer pair. One that patches over some of the rougher stuff. It’s just, at its heart —even as the openly queer Jones is both serving and devouring this movie up like a feast for everybody withing miles—this is another movie where the queer-coded is seen as a monstrosity. And in 2026… what are we doing?

There’s been talk, including from yours truly, about how a creep of conservatism has been stinking things up in the horror genre as of late—in my review I called Obsession “regressive as get out” and I maintain that stance even as that movie has ballooned into the year’s greatest box office phenom. Perhaps even more so now, since the popular appeal of its kind of thinking, whether subconscious or not, does unsettle me. The through-line from that to the real world where trans-peoples’ rights are being stripped away ito less than nothing, and every poll indicates support for gay marriage is also headed downward, is actually not nothing.

It doesn’t seem out of bounds to note here that all of these movies, from Obsession to the anti-abortion strains of Undertone to hell even the cringe marital-horror of Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, are movies directed by straight white men that, at least superficially, aim at unraveling straight white manhood circa 2026. A noble enough subject in this nightmare era we find ourselves in! And yet most of these movies do a very bad job at it—yes Obsession is aware that Bear’s a shitty person. But Obsession is never a movie about Bear being the thing that’s scaring us on the screen.

I do think Breeder is the best and the most fun of this rag-tag bunch of troublingly like-minded movies, and (much like Inde Navarrette in Obsession) Dot-Marie Jones turns in such a big bravura performance here that she almost convinces us that her character is the film’s real driving force. But just like Navarrette’s Nikki it’s impossible to avoid the fact that Patti is a straight man’s nightmare sprung to life. And as much as these films and their main fellas get off on being repeatedly, incessantly, you might even say ritualistically humiliated by these women, we’re never watching these stories through the woman’s eyes. They’re always the ones popping up out of the dark, shrieking castration anxiety in a skirt.

Breeder just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. IFC and Shudder will release it later this year.