Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) is a prosperous Applejack salesman traversing the snow-covered tundra of North America, slinging his Acme Applejack wherever he can.  One drunken celebration ends abruptly when beavers gnaw their way through the stilts of the large barrels holding the crisp, apple hooch, toppling them.  On his wintery hunt for vengeance, Jean discovers that this attack was all part of a larger plan on behalf of the beavers, and it is up to him to put their damn building to a stop. 

Mike Cheslik directs Hundreds of Beavers, a silent-inspired comedy he co-wrote with Tews.  The strings-showing indie debuted at the 2022 edition of the Fantastic Fest before embarking on a years-long festival run until it finally received a limited theatrical opening and eventual digital release courtesy of FilmHub.  While on its seemingly endless tour, the 108-minute film garnered much love and acclaim, winning 18 of the 21 awards it was nominated for across the various festivals. 

It feels odd to call Tews’ performance here brave, but under today’s standards and expectations, it is.  Unabashedly standing on the shoulders of silent stars Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, Tews is unafraid to debase himself in front of Quinn Hester’s lens for the sake of the joke.  Pulling inspiration from those silent stalwarts, it makes sense that the film follows Looney Tunes logic, especially with its reliance on cartoonish setups involving woodland creatures, but Cheslik is not bound by the sensibilities of the time, the television censors, or even the MPAA as the film bypassed the ratings group in the States.  The film does not push the limits of its freedom, but Cheslik and Tews revel away from the gaze of these bodies knowing they do not have to answer to anyone and can present the purest, unadulterated version of their story.  This allows them to lean into some more absurd and gaudy sketches that find Jean building voluptuous snowwomen or running through the wilderness stark naked.  The pair never try to push into any depraved territory, but Hundreds of Beavers is a film that could only be made in the scrappy, independent sector of today’s market and the pair are happy to exploit that at the very least. 

The result is a wildly inventive, slightly irreverent farce that finds Jean facing off against a delightfully costumed troupe of actors wearing what can only be described as elaborate onesies representing the rabbits, beavers, or wolves, all of which Jean encounters on his quest.  There is also a similarly scrappy two-man horse costume filled with a pair of deliberately uncoordinated actors who steal the scene. So much of the film’s success comes from its absolute embrace of artificiality with incredible production design.  What is so unique is that it walks that line of blending soundstage sets and location so well, as to lean too far one way or another would invoke a whole different style and period of filmmaking, stripping the film of the identity that is is seeking to present as.  It truly does feel like a live-action cartoon while stringently adhering to the zany logic that is slowly established through Jean’s trial and error resulting in either the progression of plot, but more often than not, a gag.  

This pattern, though, is a bit of the film’s undoing.  The novel conceit of mounting a silent comedy wears thin because Cheslik does bend the rules of the medium a little bit in his favor instead of utilizing the same toolkit available to those pioneers of cinema.  This is not to deride that Hundreds of Beavers, with its surely microscopic budget, made the obvious choice to shoot on digital; the other option would be a lapsed GoFundMe page seeking funds for Kodak stock garnering dust in some corner of the internet.  It is not even that he cheats the form by working in some diegetic sound, but it would have been nice for it to have its sound effects incorporated as part of the score.  It is the shocking lack of intertitles that makes this goofy little film feel so inaccessible at times.  Much of the runtime is a barrage of physical comedy so it is not all that intricately plotted, but this choice to leave audiences without even a basic framework makes the film feel much longer than it actually is.  As we sit, we do begin to pick up on some repetitive action beyond just a setup and callback pattern, and without any real plotting having been established, the film takes on a slight quality as the jokes wear thin and Cheslik seems to be treading water instead of moving us forward.  

Those few quibbles aside, Hundreds of Beavers is an incredibly inventive and inspired work.  It may not have a sequence that will be as enduring as the “Dance of the Dinner Rolls” in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), or even some of the lesser set pieces in that similarly snow, formative work, but Cheslik’s film is not without a charm of its own and Tews delivers a calibrated performance that keeps the mood light and fun, conducive to audiences giving themselves over to the film and laughing at its antics more easily.  Having garnered quite a bit of acclaim for this not quite widely enough seen to be called a sleeper hit, Cheslik and Tews will still certainly have some doors opened to them, but it will be interesting to see if any studio, even the more artist-friendly ones, knows what they would be getting themselves into if they allow the duo to be themselves because to corporatize their vision would be to smear it into the unrecognizable sludge that currently occupies the comedy genre. There is an undefinable quality about their work given the expectations of today’s market, and while the list of inspirations is long, the list of this film’s contemporaries is brief, if one exists at all, making Hundreds of Beavers far and away the most uniquely frustrating work of the year.