Sonora Film Festival

Why It's Overlooked

Hundreds of Beavers is a film that should not exist, and the fact that it does exist is both a minor miracle and a significant obstacle to its mainstream recognition. It was made in Wisconsin on a budget of approximately $150,000, shot in black and white with actors in animal costumes representing the local wildlife, and structured as an extended silent-film-style slapstick epic in which a hapless applejack salesman must learn to trap escalating quantities of beavers in order to win the hand of a merchant's daughter. There is no distribution apparatus built for this film. There is no pre-existing audience that was waiting for it. There is no precedent for it in contemporary cinema that would help a marketing department explain it to audiences who expect films to belong to recognizable categories.

The film premiered at festivals in 2022 and accumulated genuine word-of-mouth enthusiasm from everyone who saw it, which is how all great cult films are born and how almost none of them achieve wider recognition. The critical establishment, confronted with a film this aggressively sui generis, largely responded with enthusiastic notices that nonetheless positioned the film as a curiosity — "remarkably accomplished for its budget," "a genuine achievement of low-fi filmmaking," phrases that celebrate the work while quietly ensuring it remains in the category of "interesting indie" rather than achieving the canonical status it deserves. The comparison to Looney Tunes and Buster Keaton that appeared in virtually every review is accurate and limiting simultaneously: yes, it's in that tradition, but that framing positions the film as an homage rather than an original achievement of equivalent stature.

The black-and-white photography is another barrier. Mainstream audiences have been trained by decades of color film to read black-and-white as either "prestige" (Spielberg, Coen Brothers, Pawel Pawlikowski) or "very old." A black-and-white comedy from 2022 does not fit either category comfortably, which means it falls into a gap in the cultural filing system. The people who find it tend to adore it with an intensity that seems almost disproportionate — until you watch it, at which point the intensity makes perfect sense. It is that good.

What Makes It Great

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews gives a physical performance of extraordinary invention and commitment as Jean Kayak, the world's least competent outdoorsman turned reluctant master trapper. The character is fundamentally a vehicle for slapstick escalation, but Tews manages to invest him with genuine pathos — you understand, in the wordless logic of silent comedy, exactly what Jean wants, what he fears, and why his repeated catastrophic failures at basic wilderness survival are both hilarious and almost heartbreaking. Tews has clearly absorbed Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Tati, not to reproduce them but to synthesize them into something new: a performance style that honors the tradition while being entirely contemporary in its timing and invention.

What makes Hundreds of Beavers extraordinary rather than merely accomplished is the formal intelligence underlying what appears to be gleeful chaos. Director Mike Cheslik constructs the film as a system of escalation that operates on multiple simultaneous registers — physical stakes, narrative complexity, and visual absurdity all increasing in tandem until the climactic sequence, which involves literally hundreds of the titular animals and achieves a kind of demented grandeur that recalls Keaton's great chase sequences in films like The General and Seven Chances. The animal costumes, which could easily read as cheap or embarrassing, instead function as a brilliant formal choice: the cartoonish simplicity of the antagonists forces the audience to meet the film on its own terms, to engage with the logic of the comedy rather than the logic of realism. The result is a film that operates in a mode that Hollywood has entirely abandoned — pure physical comedy at sustained feature length — and demonstrates that the mode is not only still viable but capable of achieving genuine artistic heights.

Who Should Watch It

Hundreds of Beavers is essential viewing for anyone who has ever laughed at a Looney Tunes short and wondered why nothing in contemporary cinema makes them feel that way. If you have seen The General or Safety Last! or Mon Oncle and understood those films as high artistic achievements rather than quaint historical artifacts, this film belongs in exactly that company. It is also the rare contemporary comedy that is genuinely, helplessly funny — not in the warm chuckle mode of television comedy or the ironic-detachment mode of art-house humor, but in the full-body, involuntary, catch-your-breath mode that the great slapstick masters achieved and that almost no one has attempted since. If you need your comedies to come from a major studio and be about recognizable human experiences, this film will not be for you. If you are willing to meet a film on its own terms, you will be rewarded with something close to pure cinematic joy. Go find it. It is one of the best films of its decade.

Sonora Festival Context

At the 2024 Sonora Film Festival, Hundreds of Beavers took home Best Picture — tied with Action USA, in recognition of two films representing entirely different and equally valid forms of cinematic achievement — along with Best Location for the Beaver Fort, Best Song, Theme, or Soundtrack, and Most Provocative Use of a Prop for the Beaver Stripper Pole, a distinction awarded without deliberation and with complete consensus. The committee noted that the Beaver Stripper Pole is one of those props that makes total sense within the film's logic and complete nonsense outside it, which is exactly the kind of prop the award was designed to honor.

The festival has always championed films that do things that mainstream cinema has forgotten how to do, and Hundreds of Beavers does something that mainstream cinema has not merely forgotten but has apparently decided is impossible: it makes a full-length slapstick comedy that is as formally rigorous, as cinematically inventive, and as genuinely funny as the greatest work in the tradition. That it accomplishes this on a microbudget, with first-time-feature-length director Mike Cheslik, in the middle of a Wisconsin winter, with actors in beaver suits, is not a mitigating circumstance but an amplifying one. Constraint, in the hands of filmmakers with genuine vision, produces clarity. Hundreds of Beavers is the clearest possible statement of what slapstick comedy can be when you understand what it actually is.

The Sonora Film Festival's selection of this film is both an act of advocacy and an act of celebration. There is enough darkness in cinema, and in the world. Hundreds of Beavers is one hundred and eight minutes of unalloyed, rigorously crafted, completely committed joy. The festival is delighted to have had the occasion to show it, and confidently predicts that everyone who watches it will thank us.