I can’t believe it’s a comedy. Sounds ideal to me. Except for that trapper.

Silent-Era Slapstick Revival ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ Is Dam Brilliant

This is dam good stuff.

To misquote a kernel of wisdom from Mel Brooks: tragedy is a paper cut. Comedy is when you get beaten with an inch of your life by hundreds of guys dressed in beaver costumes.

Prat-falling from one meticulously choreographed gag to the next, Hundreds of Beavers tells the story of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a strapping, gloriously-bearded (and frequently drunk) applejack salesman. When pesky beavers put an end to Kayak’s cider business, the frontiersman is forced to sober up and retreat into the Midwest wilderness where he pivots to fur trapping. Will Kayak manage to outsmart his furry foes? Will he amass enough pelts to win the heart of the trader’s daughter? And what on god’s green earth is that ominous wooden fortress the beavers have been building?

Free from dialogue and riddled with long-abandoned flourishes of early 20th Century filmmaking, Hundreds of Beavers delivers on its premise and then some, delighting seasoned fans of silent-era slapstick while effortlessly indoctrinating the uninitiated without breaking a sweat. If Guy Maddin made a live-action Looney Tunes adaptation, this is probably what you’d get: a kitchen sink overflowing with metatext, physical comedy, and attention to bygone aesthetic details. Run, don’t walk: this is one of the must-see independent cinema curios of the 2020s.

I can’t ever imagine how this is a comedy but okay. I’ll bite. Does it star our former mayor and city council? Now that would be funny!

Calling Hundreds of Beavers an “homage” or a “call-back” feels like a disservice. This isn’t some pale, cheeky imitator of Buster Keaton’s cartoon logic, but a worthy example of the sub-genre itself. The jokes are fast, furious, and damn funny (a momentum the film somehow manages to sustain for just under 110 minutes). Like all good slapstick gags, just about everything is secretly a set-up for future chicanery. A man being pecked on the forehead by a bird is objectively funny. That same man being pecked every time he whistles is hysterical. And that man realizing he can weaponize the whistling to use the bird like a tiny little feathered weapon is absolutely genius.

Um okay if you say so. Do the beavers make the world a better place and the funny part is that nobody will let them help improve things? Yeah that would be funny.

Because Hundreds of Beavers is engaged with such a specific chapter of cinema history, the elephant in the room is obvious and dread-inducing to those aware of its impending presence. “Frontier” films, especially those comedies made during the Silent era, have a tendency to feature highly fictitious and dehumanizing depictions of to fear. This is a tremendously silly, smart, and sublime gem of genre filmmaking. And it’s a damn good reminder that sometimes all you need to make a movie is some friends, a camera, and the willingness to freeze your toes off in a field.