So I’d heard multiple recommendations for this movie, but I had managed to avert my eyes anytime I was going to hear any detail about what it was, so I ended up going in completely blind, with no awareness of what this was beyond “a comedy.”

As it starts off, it’s a stylized black-and-white semi-animated thing with a musical number; when it ends, I’m like “well, that was an interesting intro” and am curious to see what the actual movie is… and it just keeps going in the same style (albeit without all the singing, and without most of the animation).

Because yeah, turns out this is a silent-era-style physical comedy about a nineteenth-century fur trapper. There’s sound in the movie, but there’s no dialogue (and there are occasionally intertitles); everything happens purely visually.

And it’s brilliant. It’s like a mash-up of Charlie Chaplin (given the outdoorsy setting, I kept thinking of The Gold Rush) with Looney Tunes; but all twisted with a modern sensibility, like if that style of movie had just been invented for the first time in the current culture, with e.g. stylized videogame moments and the like.

It has its own imaginative visual language that it develops — the first time you see an animal that’s clearly a human wearing a silly full-body costume, you laugh; but as the movie goes on, that just becomes what animals look like. You wouldn’t think that a movie built on physical comedy could sustain a full ninety minutes, but it does, switching from scene to scene before the old bit could wear out its welcome.

In addition to the comedy, it also has some great action scenes. I’m usually bored with action scenes in movies, because they’re all following familiar, predictable beats in ways that seem rote. But the action scenes here are doing clever and novel things — even as they’re simultaneously paying homage to hoary staples like a saw in a table, or logs going down a twisting water slide.

This is such a unique movie that I’m tempted to say it’s only for people with a specific sense of humor — who would watch a brand-new silent movie in 2025? — but then, it’s just so good and so accessible, I think almost anyone could just sit down and watch this and find themselves laughing a lot. (It’s kinda kid-friendly, except for some sexual innuendo and graphic violence, but it’s obviously written for an adult audience.)