Breeder Review: A Chilling Villain Can't Save Bleak, Empty Horror Movie

Though Dot-Marie Jones breathes life into a fascinating, creepy character, the film as a whole takes solid potential and does little with it.

Published Oct 27, 2026, 10:01 AM EDT

Alex is the Senior Editor of Reviews & Prestige Content, overseeing ScreenRant's film reviews as one of its Rotten Tomatoes-approved critics. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in English, he spent a locked-down year in Scotland completing a Master's in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which he hears is a nice, lively city. He now lives in and works from Milan, Italy, conveniently a short train ride from the Venice Film Festival, which he first covered for SR in 2024.

An out-there genre premise can live or die by how a film approaches the context around it. Consider (to use two Yorgos Lanthimos movies) the difference between Dogtooth and The Lobster. The former contrasts its disturbing family dynamic with the relatively normal society around it; the latter exists in a world as off-kilter as the last-resort singles retreat it's set in. How we experience these stories, as well as how we interpret them, is defined in part by these respective approaches.

Breeder, a grim new horror film written, directed, and edited by Alex Goyette, does not make the choice I expected. Its premise is simple: A struggling scientist finds himself unfortunately entangled with a dog breeder who's pivoted to breeding people. As a horror experience, the idea sells itself. But, rather than make the breeder's farm an oasis of weird, the scientist's life before the fateful encounter also has touches of oddness – eugenics clearly goes beyond the norm, but exactly how far beyond it is hard to gauge.

This was, I believe, a poor decision. As much as Breeder crafts a strong atmosphere and some impressive, lingering discomfort, both driven by a captivating performance from Dot-Marie Jones, it lacks the significance it could have had with a different approach to worldbuilding. It should pack a Dogtooth punch, and feels at times to reach for something deeper. But, as it sinks into bleakness, you may find yourself wondering what it was all for.

Breeder Is Thoroughly Inconsistent (Aside From Its Terrifying Villain)

Russell (Daniel Doheny) begins the film in a tough spot. Brilliant and plagued by anxiety, he's having trouble securing funding for the research project he stepped away from his MIT PhD program to pursue. He has frightening levels of student debt, with no concrete way to dig himself out of that hole. Haley (Tanaya Beatty), his fiancée, is supportive, but her family is starting to apply pressure – and Haley's becoming more eager to have a child Russell's worried they can't afford.

In this context, Patti's (Dot-Marie Jones) letter feels like a godsend. This breeder of poodles writes him out of the blue with praise for his project, a sizable check, and an invitation to have dinner at her farm to discuss further funding. Haley is justifiably suspicious, but Russell feels he has no choice but to hear her out. So, after several hours' drive and an awkward period of pretending to care about Patti's old dog show tapes, he finds himself sitting at her table, along with her five daughters.

Patti (and, by extension, Breeder) doesn't beat around the bush. She hands Russell a blank check, telling him she's decided to fully fund his research – if he agrees to impregnate Ainsley (Maddie Phillips), her eldest and most accomplished daughter. Patti's a full-blown eugenicist, and as with her prize-winning poodles, she breeds for intelligence; she's less enamored with Russell's work than with the write-up his IQ received in Mensa's magazine. If he objects, he can drive back to the life he left, with no change in his prospects. If he agrees, he has to follow Patti's rules and stay at the farm until the deed is done.

Breeder knows where to take its story, but not why.

Patti is Breeder's great creation, and Jones its greatest asset. Her presence is responsible for much of the film's unsettling atmosphere. Patti's Trunchbull-esque physique establishes a sense of threat that never dissipates, while attempts to flesh out her psychology only make her more enigmatic. The ease with which she slips into rage is concerning, but the creepiest element of Jones' performance by far is her repeated attempts to be cutesy and whimsical. In other hands, it may have been a goofy choice. In Jones', it'll make you shudder.

Most of the film is far less consistent. The performances are varied enough that I lacked a clear sense of the tone Goyette was looking to create, and I spent too much of Breeder feeling adrift as a result. Narratively, the movie has a tendency to introduce interesting (and even surprising) elements that seem ready to crack the whole thing wide open, and then explore them in fairly limited ways. If the first couple have you leaning forward, expecting the film to prove itself more than it initially appears to be, that response gradually diminishes. Eventually, I just had to accept that a Barbarian moment would never come.

The ending helped me understand my problem with it: Breeder knows where to take its story, but not why. The attempt to close the thematic loop of its central premise is, on paper, an interesting choice. But when the larger message has been poorly seeded in its main character, and hardly baked into the rest of the film, it feels like going through the motions. As the credits rolled, aside from the weight of its bleak outlook, I mostly felt disappointingly empty.

Breeder releases in US theaters on Wednesday, October 28.