The Musical is a prickly, uneven but intriguingly sharp first feature from director Giselle Bonilla, a film that clearly knows what it wants to be, even if it doesn’t always get there. Equal parts workplace satire, personal meltdown, and theatrical farce, the movie operates best when it leans into its absurdity, and falters when it asks us to sit too long with a protagonist who is more fascinating in theory than in sustained practice.
At its center is Doug Leibowitz (Will Brill), a middle-school drama teacher and frustrated playwright whose simmering resentment boils over when he discovers his ex-girlfriend, Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), has begun dating his smug, image-obsessed principal, Brady (Rob Lowe). When Brady announces that the school is in contention for a prestigious Blue Ribbon award, Doug seizes the opportunity to sabotage both his rival and the institution he increasingly despises by secretly devising a wildly inappropriate alternative musical with his impressionable students.
Bonilla brings a vibrant, colorful energy to the proceedings, and there’s a cheeky pleasure in watching the film poke at the performative politics of modern education, where appearances often matter more than substance. Alexander Heller’s script has a clever conceptual spine, and there are moments of genuine bite in its satire of both school administration and the theater world. The middle-school performers – particularly Melanie Herrera as eager Latina theatre kid, Lata – add warmth and unpredictability, grounding the film’s darker impulses with youthful enthusiasm.
That said, The Musical often feels stretched thin. Doug is an interesting character on paper – a deeply insecure, socially awkward man spiraling into self-righteous villainy – but the film struggles to give him enough dimensionality to sustain its runtime. Brill commits fully, yet Doug’s bitterness becomes repetitive, and the movie doesn’t always do enough to deepen or complicate him. Similarly, Jacobs and Lowe are well-cast but underutilized, more symbolic figures than fully fleshed-out people.
Where the film truly shines is in its climactic set piece, an outrageously audacious musical number that fully embraces chaos and dark comedy. It’s the kind of sequence that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll (you will truly be unprepared), and you can’t help but wish the rest of the film had matched its boldness. Too often, The Musical feels like it’s circling anarchy without quite diving in.
Ultimately, this is a promising but imperfect debut; sharp in flashes, muddled in others, and undeniably memorable in its final moments. The Musical isn’t quite the subversive masterpiece it aspires to be, but it’s also far from a failure. Instead, it lands somewhere in between: a spiky, messy, occasionally brilliant comedy that points to a director with a distinct voice still finding her footing.
TWO AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Musical is screening as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, running between January 22nd and February 1st, 2026. For more information on tickets and session times, head to the official site here.
