Bluebeard's Brother: A dusty, weird trip through silent-era logic

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you're the type of person who digs through bargain bins at antique stores looking for weird, unlabeled 16mm film canisters. If you need a plot that holds your hand or characters who actually behave like humans, skip this immediately. It’s for the silent film completionists and the folks who want to see how cinema looked before it figured out how to be, well, good.

The whole thing feels like it was put together on a lunch break. Paul Terry is all over this, and you can really tell. It’s got that jittery, low-budget energy that reminds me a bit of the frantic pacing in Alice's Auto Race, though with significantly less charm and way more confusion.

Odd little observations

• There is a sequence involving a doorway that goes on for way longer than it needs to. I counted. It’s almost painful.
• The lighting choices are… a bold statement. Mostly dark, then suddenly blindingly bright for no reason.
• The way characters just stand around waiting for the next cue is hilariously obvious.

It’s funny, I was watching this and couldn't stop thinking about Spuds. Maybe it’s the way the sets look like they were made out of cardboard and hope. There’s a specific scene where a character walks into a room and just… waits. Like, they are waiting for a ghost to show up or the director to yell cut. The silence in the room actually feels heavy.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Bluebeard's Brother (1932) through its definitive frames.

You can tell the movie is trying to be ominous, but it mostly just ends up being bizarrely quiet. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s definitely something. It has that same weird, detached feeling I got while watching The Fast Mail-Man, where you’re just kind of watching people move through a space without really understanding why they are there or what they want.

I don’t think Paul Terry really cared if the audience understood the geography of the house. Walls seem to move. Doors appear where they weren't a second ago. It’s not high art, it’s just… messy. But sometimes messy is more fun than a polished studio product, right? Or maybe I’ve just watched too many of these old, scratchy films this week.

Either way, don't go in expecting a cohesive narrative. Go in expecting to be baffled. 📽️