Hundreds of Beavers

Hundreds of Beavers (2024) is a black-and-white silent comedy from director Mike Cheslik — watch it online on iFILM and try to explain the plot to someone without sounding unhinged. It's 108 minutes of a hapless applejack salesman in 19th-century Wisconsin getting physically humiliated by increasingly organized wildlife, mostly beavers.

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews plays Jean Kayak, who loses his entire operation to a fire and decides — or is forced by loneliness and hunger — to become a fur trapper. He is extraordinarily bad at it. The animals beat him up. The beavers especially. The one thing keeping him going is the daughter of the local fur merchant, who won't consider a suitor unless he can actually trap something. The film runs on escalating cartoon logic, Buster Keaton slapstick, and what appears to be an inexhaustible supply of people in rodent suits.

No CGI. No dialogue to speak of. Shot on a micro-budget and turned into a festival cult hit before most people heard of it. Cheslik built a feature that plays like a video game speedrun crossed with a Looney Tunes short — and it earns every absurd minute. Stream Hundreds of Beavers (2024) online on iFILM.