Part Misery, part Island of Dr. Moreau, and part Mommie Dearest, Alex Goyette's Breeder is darkly humorous thriller that finds its protagonist trapped in an isolated farmhouse to be used as a human stud for his captor's eugenic plan to breed intellectually superior babies. The irony, of course, is that the "stud" is anything but what we typically think that term would indicate; instead, he is a rather mousy almost-but-not-quite-MIT graduate who is just a dissertation away from a Ph.D., which has kept him from advancing his personal research agenda involving the genetic manipulation of bees. It is his IQ that makes him most desirable, and his entrapment is based on dangling a blank check that could pay for his research. Birds and bees, indeed.

The protagonist in question is Russell (Daniel Doheny), and he travels into the country to meet with a woman named Patti Kolb (Dot-Marie Jones), who wrote him the equivalent of a fan letter praising his research and promising funding. Russell's fiancée, Haley (Tanaya Beatty), who is level-headed and sensible, is rightfully skeptical, but Russell is so jazzed over the prospects of academic success that he can't turn down the offer, no matter how weird it seems. Once he arrives at Patti's remote farmhouse, it is clear that things are not quite right, and it goes from weird, to weirder, to creepy, to dangerous in short time. The narrative is compressed and efficient, which never allows it to drag, but also risks cutting out some of the tension that might have been drawn out to even more malicious ends. Writer/director Alex Goyette, who has spent the past decade making short films and directing episodes of short-lived TV series, has a keen sense of how awkward humor and psychological horror intersect, and much of the film feels like a calculated punishment of Russell's ego. He is not a bad guy—he's scruffy, sarcastic, and generally likable—but he makes the mistake of allowing his ambition and his pride lead him into a dark corner from which he may never escape.

When Breeder really works, it is primarily due to the central performance by Dot-Marie Jones, a hulking former arm wrestling-champion-turned-unlikely actor who is best known for playing manly female coaches (including one on the popular series Glee, for which she was Emmy-nominated). Jones is a formidable physical presence on-screen, which makes Daniel Doheny's Russell seem all the smaller and more vulnerable. Patti's physicality is enhanced by her see-saw mood swings that turn her on a dime from girlishly enthusing about her past as an award-winning miniature poodle breeder to absolute menace. Her demands are frequently absurd, and she delivers them with a straight face that is both darkly humorous and utterly terrifying in its abject seriousness. She oversees a houseful of daughters, who range in age from elementary school to college, like some kind of overlord, and with the exception of Haley's attempts to contact Russell and the inopportune appearance of a police officer (John Murphy), it might as well exist in its own dimension. That isolation, combined with Jones's domineering performance, ensures that Breeder remains taut right down to its deeply ironic ending, which has quite a bit to say about how far ego and ambition and money will drive us.

Copyright © 2026 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © IFC / Shudder