Breeder Earns Its Pedigree
Dot-Marie Jones is a gleeful menace in Alex Goyette's nasty little horror-comedy about dog shows and human eugenics, a film far funnier, and far more uncomfortable, than it has any business being.
By MIGUEL MATEO | JUNE 11, 2026
Breeder is the most confidently strange film I caught at this year's Tribeca. The premise alone could be a dare. A poodle breeder obsessed with genetic perfection sets her sights on an MIT dropout and offers him a proposition no sane person would entertain, which is to breed with her daughter and improve the bloodline. Alex Goyette, who writes, directs, and edits, takes that lurid one-line pitch and refuses to play it for cheap shock. He plays it straight-faced, which is exactly why it lands, and which is exactly why I spent ninety-seven minutes laughing and squirming in roughly equal measure.
The reason the whole thing holds together is Dot-Marie Jones. As Patti, the breeder at the dark center of it, she is having the time of her life, and you feel it in every scene. She is funny in a way that keeps catching you off guard, breezy one moment and quietly terrifying the next, and she never tips her hand on which one is coming. More than once she gave me flashes of Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Misery, that same unnerving trick of letting chipper, matter-of-fact conviction and real menace live in a single face, and I do not reach for an Oscar-winning turn as a comparison lightly. It is a performance that hovers right at the edge of camp, and gloriously so. Jones knows exactly where that line sits and dances along it on purpose, never quite tumbling into parody but never pretending the whole enterprise is not a little delicious either, and the result is a villain you cannot look away from. If there is a single reason to see this film, she is it.
She needs a foil who can absorb all that menace, and Daniel Doheny gives her one. As Russell, the financially desperate young man who walks into the wrong farmhouse, Doheny is all flop sweat and bad judgment, the kind of guy who keeps telling himself he can leave right up until the moment he obviously cannot. He plays shame and awkwardness beautifully, and his discomfort becomes the audience's discomfort. The comedy of the film lives in the gap between how reasonable everyone pretends the arrangement is and how monstrous it actually becomes, and Doheny is the one holding that gap open.
Goyette directs with a confidence that the premise does not telegraph. He builds dread the slow way, letting the breeding farm itself do a lot of the work, all dim corridors and the sense that something is being kept just out of frame. There is a real craft in how he modulates the tone, sliding between deadpan farce and genuine horror without ever jolting you out of the world he has made. If I wanted anything more, it was more of Patti herself. I loved her so much that I came out selfishly wishing the film had narrowed its lens onto her, trading some of the plot machinery for a full character study of this woman and her terrible certainties. That I left hungry for more of a monster rather than less of her is the highest compliment I can pay both the role and the performer. The film already knows that the most unsettling thing it can do is treat eugenics as a perfectly ordinary household project, and it is never sharper than when Patti is simply allowed to fill the frame.
That is the joke underneath the joke, and it is why the film feels less like a horror exercise than a satire with teeth. The talk of bloodlines and superior genes lands differently in 2026 than it would have a decade ago, and Goyette knows it. Calling it horror undersells how much of it plays as a queasy comic thriller, and that is not a complaint. The ending will divide people, and I can already feel the argument coming over whether its final turn is too cynical or exactly as cynical as the material demands. I lean toward the latter, though it is the one place where I wished the film trusted its audience a little more.
None of that dims what Goyette and his cast pull off here, and it is no surprise IFC Films snapped it up before the festival even began. Breeder is a confident, controlled, genuinely strange piece of work, anchored by a performance from Dot-Marie Jones that deserves to follow her around for the rest of the year. It is the rare festival oddity I expect to be pressing on friends long after the lights come up.
Rating: ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Screened at Tribeca Film Festival