Dumb-Bell Letters No. 17: Why Are We Reading Someone's Mail?

Is this actually worth your time?

Honestly, it depends on how much you enjoy the feeling of snooping through someone’s junk drawer. If you’re a fan of oddball vintage humor, you’ll probably get a kick out of it. If you need a plot, or character arcs, or anything resembling a coherent thought—skip it. You’ll hate it.

Juliet Jowell apparently spent way too much time collecting these letters. The whole premise feels like a TikTok trend, just about a hundred years too early. People really had time on their hands back then, didn't they?

The vibe

The film doesn’t try to be anything other than a collection of goofs. There’s no prestige here. Just pure, unadulterated nonsense plucked from the morning mail of business firms. Some of these letters are genuinely baffling. The way people wrote about their problems back then—it’s like they were writing a novel just to ask for a refund.

It reminds me a bit of the frantic, slightly disjointed energy you find in Poor Cinderella, but with way more grammar errors. It’s not trying to be a deep dive into the human condition. It just wants you to chuckle at a typo.

• The pacing is frantic.
• The editing feels like it was done with a pair of rusty kitchen scissors.
• The humor is... well, it's very specific to a certain kind of person.

I found myself wondering if these people knew their letters were being turned into a movie. Imagine writing a complaint about a faulty dumb-bell and ending up in a flick. That's a weird legacy.

It lacks the emotional weight of something like Tragedies of the Osage Hills, but let's be real—that’s a good thing. Sometimes you just want to watch people be bad at spelling.

The whole thing feels like it’s about 15 minutes too long. But then again, maybe that’s the point. It just drags on, much like that scene in Masked Emotions where everything just stops moving for a beat. Except here, the silence isn't dramatic. It's just... quiet.

Anyway. It’s a curiosity. A weird, dusty, paper-filled curiosity. 🤷‍♂️