Sundance ‘26: ‘THE MUSICAL’ Is Elite Crash Out Cringe Comedy

Doug Leibowitz (Will Brill) is an ostensibly mild-mannered but deeply disillusioned middle school theater teacher and once maybe promising playwright. When the Cedarhurst Middle School teacher is forced to confront the reality that his ex-girlfriend Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), who he thought he was still “on a break” with, has started dating the smarmy, aggressively politically correct school principal Brady (Rob Lowe), Doug suffers a near-total mental breakdown. In a bid for revenge and recognition, Doug decides to tank the school’s reputation, and alongside it Principal Brady’s, as the two are competing for a blue ribbon of academic excellence. To do so, Doug shelves his class’s production of West Side Story in favor of a secret musical he wrote about 9/11.

My friend described this as “Rushmore by way of The Shining,” and it is hard to improve upon that. The deadpan cringe humor carries strong Tim Robinson DNA as The Musical often feels like a feature-length episode of I Think You Should Leave, albeit one that manages to juice its concept for a full 90-minutes of deliciously dark lols. What initially registers as a kind of Napoleon Dynamite-level awkwardness and social dysfunction takes a darker turn. To get a sense of our lead’s interiority, Doug reveals to Abigail that his therapist recently diagnosed him with “PTSD from human touch,” a throwaway line that is not meant to elicit sympathy so much as to clarify just how alienated and unreachable he is. And how effortlessly funny the script from Alexander Heller remains.

Directed by Giselle Bonilla, The Musical leans hard into Doug’s unraveling as the film retreats further into his psychosis. Bonilla tilts her camera, framing Doug’s meltdown in increasingly grotesque detail. While voiceover narration is often a cinematic faux pas, here it works remarkably well, enriching the comedy by applying a moody, noir-ish tone that heightens Doug’s mania rather than explaining it away.

Brill is the movie’s secret weapon. Our relative unfamiliarity with him makes Doug’s trajectory from bland, inoffensive middle school teacher to fully unhinged spite curator all the more effective. Doug repeatedly tells his students that the superpower of theater is surprise, and the same could be said for the performances, writing, and execution here.

Much of the film’s comedy stems from the sheer insanity of pairing a character like Doug with a group of middle schoolers. Nearly everything he says or does with them is wildly inappropriate. When he is not dressing them up in beards and turbans to reenact the “Welcome to Afghanistan” section of his 9/11 musical, or impressing upon them the importance of keeping the play’s true subject secret from their parents, other teachers, and especially Principal Brady, he is dispensing off-colored pearls of wisdom like “it’s okay to lie as long as it’s for the right reasons” and “outsiders can’t be trusted.” Doug and the kids become co-conspirators, rehearsing in secret to ensure the musical reaches opening night, their subterfuge growing more elaborate, unhinged, and hilarious. Then it peaks with committed children dressed as airplanes screaming and sprinting into cardboard twin towers.

As a laughs-per-capita comedy, and as a showcase for a bracing new comedic voice, The Musical is one of the funniest films I have seen in years. Will Brill’s fearless performance anchors Alexander Heller’s audacious script and Giselle Bonilla’s increasingly unhinged direction, all of it built around a concept so wrongheaded it circles back to brilliance. It also arguably features the funniest title card reveal of all time, the kind that leaves you laughing even as the screen cuts to black.

CONCLUSION: Powered by Will Brill’s fearless performance and the audacious pairing of director Giselle Bonilla and writer Alexander Heller, ‘The Musical’ emerges as one of the funniest comedy debuts in years, built around the truly unhinged idea of a broken middle school English teacher staging a 9/11 musical to destroy his principal.