Hundreds of Beavers and the Synthesizing of Elements

If film is the medium that encompasses all other mediums, then it can be said that a director’s most important skill is their ability to synthesize a variety of elements into a cohesive whole. Directors, at their core, are glorified (and sometimes handsomely paid) project managers.  When actors gush about a director’s “vision”, they’re really just saying that the director had a clear idea for how the project should look, feel, and operate, and was able to Shepard this trifecta of beliefs through the marathon/machine/all out assault of the numerous phases of production.

Famously, Steven Soderbergh saw Mad Max: Fury Road and immediately recognized it as something so directorially complex that he could not wrap his mind around how to make it, let alone how it could be made without killing every single person involved. While Soderbergh hasn’t spoken publicly about it (to my knowledge), I would guess he had a similar response to 2022’s RRR, the S. S. Rajamouli film that electrified cinema culture and drew western eyes to a side of cinema culture many were unfamiliar with. What both films have in common is that they not only operate at the highest possible level of their mediums, but that they do so by understanding a fundamental concept to the Nth degree and proceed to stack that concept into a tower so unbelievably tall that you can’t comprehend how it even came to be. They are films burgeoning and exploding with concepts, characters, life, inventiveness, and sheer directorial verve. So much so that in the maze of these things, you lose track of how A could possibly connect to Z, let alone double H or triple Q. It is extremely, stupidly, hilariously difficult to list the ways in which Hundreds of Beavers does all of these same things and more. It’s even harder to articulate all the ways in which this film set my formalist film brain on fire. Like Fury Road, it is an orgy of events so bizarre and unendingly complex that the math becomes less about solving the problem and more about how they managed to track each element in doing so. 

It must be said that prior to seeing the film for the first time last year, I’d spent months chuckling to myself over the hilarious (and intentionally) obtuse title of this film. But there is no world in which I would have pegged this film as being so bold in bending both genre and form. By my count, the film capably and easily traipses through silent slapstick, kung fu, action, horror, courtroom drama, mystery, and a host of others that are seamlessly woven together, if only just in passing. To check another big name, it is Bong Joon-Ho-grade genre hopping. Specifically in how it briefly adopts the trappings and language of something else while never losing focus on the central tension (and tone) of its scene or larger story. That it does this while liberally pulling from and mashing together the visual language of cartoons, video games, and 00’s flash animations is what makes Hundreds of Beavers one of the most singular and astounding films this decade. In one bravura sequence, the film somehow manages to weave in elements of a Zack Snyder movie, Frogger, and Happy Tree Friends, all before ending on a 50’s courtroom drama. Perhaps most astoundingly, it does all of this at a budget level that is practically infinitesimal for a film of this scope. 

150k is considered a micro budget by most estimates. It’s an understatement to say that this film gets the absolute most out of every red cent. There has been plenty of writing about not only how this film came to life, but the deep bag of tricks the filmmakers used to do so. But it should not be overstated that the tools are just the tools. What I find so breathtaking here isn’t just the tools, the set ups, or the artistry. It’s the sheer level of craft and coherence that has gone into every single image (sometimes literally since the filmmakers also did all the VFX themselves). Like Fury Road and RRR before it, Hundreds of Beavers knows not only the basic elements at play, but how to expand them in interesting and inventive ways. It knows that a man in a large beaver costume is funny on its own, but it’s never satisfied with making you laugh at just one joke. The director finds ways to evolve the joke through character and story, constantly elevating the stakes through outlandish reveals (like the beaver headquarters), a flailing protagonist, and the aforementioned meshing of visual languages. Not only do the jokes evolve instead of losing their punch, they maintain the baseline reality of the gag without ever compromising it. There are hats on top of hats on top of hats. The jokes will veer so far into the obscure and absurd that you have no idea how they could possibly find a way back to that baseline reality. Yet when they finally snap back to it, it’s inventive and delightful in ways you never could have foreseen. 

Hundreds of Beavers is not just the forceful, gut busting arrival of one of cinema’s next great directorial voices. It’s a synthesis of the new and the old, the weird and the normal, the high brow and the low brow. It pulls from everywhere and against all odds, makes every piece feel new and alive, like a new style is being invented before our very eyes. It is both absurd and shot through with the same degree of craft that marks pictures from the golden age Hollywood. And like many of my favorite masterpieces, there is no reason any single part of this should exist, let alone work the way it does, at the level that it does. And yet, it does. Good God almighty it does.

Got a question or comment? Shoot me an email at [email protected].