Movie Recommendations: 3 Wordless Features
On Monday I talked about the superiority of recommendations that come from actual human beings who have expertise and taste and biases and obsessions and all of those other wonderful facets, flaws and foibles that machines will never be able to add to their cold calculations.
And so today we bring you another piece in a similar vein where filmmaker
recommends three ‘wordless’ films for us all to check out. I’ve seen two of the three and can wholeheartedly vouch for them (if that does anything further to sway you).You see, throwing out recommendations may seem a simple exercise but I think it is a valuable and under-appreciated one. The internet is awash with critiques, with takedowns, with pile-ons and hot takes and knee-jerk contrarianism but I would argue there is a real deficit of people championing stuff. I suspect this is because to advocate for something involves putting the plausible deniability that irony offers to one side and actually showing a little courage. To recommend something means you stand for something. To vouch for a work of art or cinema or music is a small thing, but it’s a small thing that is a cornerstone of a much bigger thing- which is to be able to speak freely and sincerely and to sidestep the mob and their echo-chamber. It’s to be for a thing rather than merely against it.
This is a crucial distinction.
Enjoy.
TJB.
I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!
I only recommend movies I loved watching and am eager for you to see.
Lately these recommendations have come in the form of thematic pairings. I’ve wanted to make more recommendations, but with the other projects and endeavors on my plate, they’ve been given less priority. Thematic groupings allow me to cover multiple recommendations at the cost of advocating for specific films in particular.
However, this Movie Recommendation post is also a post about opportunity: I see the recommendation going both ways, for audiences to discover great work; and for filmmakers, producers, and distributors to see that there is a valuable format worth looking at.
Back in 2008, Pixar surprised audiences with an animated movie that took 35 whole minutes of screentime before a single word of dialog was spoken. Wall-E was a crowd pleaser about a cute, lonely robot who lived and worked alone on an abandoned but very aesthetic Earth until he’s visited by, and falls in love with, a tracker robot named Eve, only for her to freeze up and be retrieved by an interstellar ark of device-addicted sausage humans waiting for their home terra-firma to grow plant life again.
Thus begins an extraordinary interstellar adventure that I argued, at the time, should have remained silent well beyond the first act, only to be told by friends and fellow film students, “Nah, audiences wouldn’t accept an entire movie without dialog.” My argument was that on the contrary, few audiences even noticed the wordlessness of the opening stretch of Wall-E. To date it’s sometimes considered an “Easter egg” despite not hiding in the background1.
Well, over the last year, independent filmmakers have released three wordless movies to appreciative audiences and some amount of institutional acclaim.
HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS
Dir. Mike Cheslik
I’ve already mentioned this movie twice in 2024 roundups, but never as a Movie Recommendation. Though many movies across the year may have won awards, Hundreds of Beavers definitely won our hearts.
A throwback to silent era slapstick comedy filtered through the hyperkinetic brain of a clear platform video game fan, Hundreds of Beavers follows a drunken applejack salesman as he tries to rebuild his life and win the heart of a fur trader’s cute daughter after his distillery explodes.
Apparently built out of a script of only a few pages long, but hundreds of pages of reference images and storyboards, the really amazing aspect of Hundreds of Beavers is how the audience learns the visual rules and mechanics of the world along with the applejack salesman as he progresses and fumbles through altercations against weather, various woodland critters, and strange – but hilariously cohesive – physics.
Mike Cheslik shot Hundreds of Beavers over several years on a budget that adds up to somewhere in the low six figures (I see $150k cited a lot) and edited and created the visual effects himself. As a work of comedy it should be studied by students of both writing and filmmaking: the entire narrative is driven by how each scene sets up an expectation that is later subverted, which lands us in a new expectation that must be surverted again, raising the stakes until the applejack salesman ultimately overcomes all adversaries, including those within himself. It’s actually sort of delirious: having seen it twice, I can attest that whenever you’re not immersed in the action itself, you can’t help but marvel at how Cheslik one-ups himself, like watching a master chess player playing both sides of the board.
Hundreds of Beavers has already gained cult status as an indie event film, with limited screenings, sometimes featuring dressed-up fans, that will probably continue circulating for quite a while. It is available on streaming and limited print Blu-Ray, but if you get the chance I recommend you see it with an audience. The laughter is infectious, and the movie creates a buzz of energy in the crowd unlike anything you’ve seen before.
FLOW (STRAUME)
Dir. Gints Zilbalodis
At time of writing, this Latvian animated feature is currently nominated for Academy Awards for both Best Animation and Best International Feature – to my knowledge something that’s never happened before. I slightly suspect it will win neither, facing the juggernaut of live action features in the foreign section and the likely industry muscle for The Wild Robot2. But if you consider what it means for an animated adventure of a wide-eyed cat to head off against sober international adult dramas, Flow has definitely attracted well-earned admiration.
Flow follows Cat, a solitary, distrustful housecat who lives in some strange surreal landscape that humans seem to have built but abandoned. As a global flood slowly overtakes all land, Cat is forced to seek refuge in a boat with Capybara, Lemur, Golden Retriever, and Secretarybird. The animals gradually learn how to protect and care for each other, communicating through looks, chitters, and their species’ respective vocalizations, as their journey becomes increasingly dazzling and increasingly mystical.
Like Hundreds of Beavers, Flow is a home-studio production, in this case built out of the 3D animation freeware Blender. Zilbalodis co-wrote, edited, and directed, as well as co-composed the synthwave score.
This one I have also watched twice, and damned if it doesn’t wrap your heartstrings in a tight fist and yank them something fierce. The first time I was dealing with personal grief at the illness (and subsequent loss) of my 18-year-old tuxedo kitty, who had eyes and coat like Cat’s. But the second time I swore to myself to be more critical, and nope. Flow isn’t just the flood and the score, it’s also what the movie makes your tears do.
Healing tears. There’s something about the mix of surreal, fairytale world and the almost universal eyebleach of cat videos that really makes you feel like you’ve worked through some stuff while watching this film.
And speaking of mystical adventures mixing movie and scores:
MYTH OF MAN
Dir. Jamin Winans
Of all three movies, this feature is probably the least known and needs the most advocacy. Much like Hundreds of Beavers, it’s a home-made indie with limited, sometimes single-night engagements. Unlike Hundreds of Beavers, it hasn’t quite gone viral yet. Now is as good a time as any to get eyes on this remarkable piece of work.
Myth of Man is a sci-fi adventure about a deaf-mute woman named Ella who receives a codex from the creator that she believes instructs her to assemble a group of people of symbolic auras to sing a song of prayer that will call the creator from a falling star to set things right. She must gain the trust of various colorful characters, most particularly the grieving and paranoid Seeg, to join her while navigating a totalitarian dystopia and regular environmental disasters in the form of a red dust storm that burns people alive.
Jamin Winans has a special place in my heart as an inspiring, zero-budget independent filmmaker. Back in 2009, I discovered Ink, his portal fantasy about a man who steals the soul of a child to join the Incubi, supernatural beings that create nightmares but who instead has to face up to the nature of his own grief. Entertaining story aside, Ink predated Tenet in impact-rewinding action sequences and was an astounding work of low-budget custom digital visual effects. Whereas 28 Days Later proved to me that you could make features on digital cameras3, Ink proved you could make stellar digital effects outside the resources of the studios.
His work has only improved and built up in scale over time, even as the mainstream industry seems disinterested in him and he seems disinterested in them in turn. I don’t know enough about his background to know exactly why, but based off the work alone, he seems to prefer to tinker away in his own worlds, using his own rules, under his own terms. Perhaps he’s uncompromising.
Nevertheless, Myth of Man is a sonic and mystical experience, an adventure that makes you believe in the powers of creation, love, and song. The music is an extremely important part of the production, as Winans is a DJ and builds even the sound-design around mixing and mastering production styles of modern electronic music. This movie is truly a fusion of animation, live-action, and musical performance.
Arguably, of all the movies here, it’s one that could be used as a backdrop or set-piece to a live performance. Even within the overall narrative are miniature vignettes, particularly of the creation myth, that include different animation styles, including some savvy call-backs to pre-cinematic illusions of movement.
At any rate, in terms of pure heft of visuals, this movie is imagination on overdrive. The only other movie I can think of that even comes close to its bespoke, full embrace of the light and textures of pure fantasy is MirrorMask, and that had the credibility of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean to get greenlit. Winans greenlit himself.
“Wordless” came from Myth of Man’s marketing. Arguably we could call these ‘silent films’, but Hundreds of Beavers is the only one of the three that seems to have ‘silent films’ in mind – and, non-ironically, plays off that genre by including precisely two actual spoken words, “J’Accuse!” and “No!4” and an opening song with lyrics (that I couldn’t parse and didn’t feel I needed to).
But “wordless” I think is a better way of thinking about these features, because even where they have words, they don’t have dialog – spoken words that deliver essential plot-points and understanding of the story. Silent films were working with technical limitations that prevented synced dialog5, “wordless” movies are aesthetic limitations to build a world of visuals and sounds.
Thus I advocate for the opportunity this may have for the commercial film industry. To a significant degree, studios have embraced lowest common denominator dialog and storytelling to attempt to make movies sellable across cultural and national barriers. Part of the reason why franchise tentpole productions have been losing their specificity in character, culture, politics, and themes over the past couple of decades is because major studios have been seeking narratives that can sell as equally well in China, Turkey, South Africa, Mexico, and Russia as the United States.
These wordless movies don’t require any dubbing and subtitles – and yet they tell full, universally comprehensible stories. They simply trust the viewer to understand the visuals and keep a firm grasp on visual and soundtrack motifs to drive both the action and feeling of the overall experience. All three movies are, ultimately, confident in themselves.
So everyone, go forth and see these movies. But also, for the filmmakers, producers, and distributors out there, make your movies like these ones, not in specific style and “wordlessness” per se, but in self-confidence.
And if Pixar ever makes Wall-E 2, it should be entirely wordless.
I also argued around the same time that the Ice Age series should have dispensed with the coyness and let Scrat, the franchise’s only interesting character, have feature length slapstick adventures without any of the dialog-driven characters slowing things down.
Which, to be clear, I have not yet seen and by all accounts is a really good movie that would be deserving of Oscar glory.
Now no longer a debatable concern!
Much like Mel Brooks upends silent film convention in Silent Movie by having the one single word of synced dialog spoken by a mime.
And typically weren’t very silent, sometimes with actors reading the intertitles while they were projected and plenty of foley and musical accompaniment
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