Taking drugs and trying to get pizza should not be a full cinematic journey, and yet Pizza Movie commits so hard to that premise that it somehow becomes one. Premiering at SXSW, the latest BriTANicK joint feels like the spiritual lovechild of Superbad, Dude Where’s My Car, and Harold & Kumar, filtered through a sleep-deprived college brain and then fed hallucinogens.
The setup is refreshingly stupid in the best way. Jack and Montgomery, college roommates with wildly different social temperatures, take a homemade drug and accidentally turn what should be a quick pizza pickup into a reality-warping odyssey. From the jump, the movie understands its mission: maximal jokes, minimal plot gravity, and a relentless commitment to escalation.
Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone are perfectly cast. It is genuinely weird at first to see the Stranger Things and Goldbergs kids all grown up and wandering around a dorm, but that novelty wears off quickly because these performances are locked in. Matarazzo is especially good at emotional storytelling purely through facial expression, doing a lot of heavy lifting without underselling the dumb joke energy. Giambrone more or less plays a familiar variation on his anxious, tightly wound persona, but it works here, and the movie smartly leans into that rhythm instead of fighting it.
What really makes the film sing is the chemistry. You can tell these actors actually like each other, which sounds like a bare minimum thing to praise, but is shockingly rare in movies like this. Add Lulu Wilson to the mix, and suddenly the leads feel like a trio you want to stay stuck with. Wilson is excellent, sharp, grounded, and effortlessly funny. It is also nice to see her pop up in something that is not a Becky-adjacent revenge movie.
Structurally, Pizza Movie does something clever. Instead of chapters, the film is divided into “rules” created by the drug itself. Each phase introduces a new condition, limitation, or reality break, and the movie commits fully to each one. Some sequences lean into body-swap energy that feels like a sideways Freaky Friday. Others skew closer to a Liar Liar style constraint. There is even a Groundhog Day-adjacent moment that had my crowd giggling in that uncontrollable, slightly embarrassed way when something stupid hits exactly right.
The drug-induced sequences are genuinely inventive. The use of practical effects mixed with chunky CG gives the hallucinations a tactile quality, especially during moments like the Pinocchio-inspired visuals, which look far better than a movie this silly has any right to. These techniques ground the insanity just enough to stop it from becoming visual noise.
Not every subplot lands. The RA storyline, while eventually tied back into the main narrative, operates at a completely different tonal frequency and never quite clicks. It feels harsher, meaner, and more grounded than the rest of the movie, which makes it stick out rather than heighten the absurdity. Similarly, Marcus Scribner’s character feels underutilized, and while Peyton Elizabeth Lee continues her streak of showing up in what feels like everything lately, some of those beats are more functional than memorable.
That said, some of the funniest moments come from extremely specific fears made literal, talking butterflies, and surreal asides that have no interest in being tidy. Daniel Radcliffe voicing a vengeful butterfly is exactly the type of sentence this movie dares you to accept without questioning, and somehow, it works.
By the time the finale arrives, the movie has fully embraced how stupid it is. The ending is aggressively dumb, but clever in the way only deeply committed nonsense can be. It is the kind of finale that leaves you thinking, “Well, that was cute,” which might sound faintly dismissive but is actually one of the highest compliments a comedy like this can earn.
Pizza Movie feels like something you would have watched on repeat in high school. The kind of movie you throw on to shut your brain off and laugh at jokes you already know are coming. I do not know if “dorm room classic” is still a thing in the streaming era, but if it is, this qualifies. It is stupid fun, slightly dark, weirdly warm, and packed wall to wall with jokes.
It would not be surprising at all if this ends up with cult classic status in a few years. Sometimes a movie just understands exactly what it is, refuses to apologize for it, and delivers.
Jessie Hobson