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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Should you watch Dumb-Bell Letters No. 6 today? Honestly, that depends on your tolerance for watching text on a screen. If you’re a fan of old-timey weirdness, it’s a total trip. If you’re looking for something with a beginning, middle, and end, you are going to be bored to tears within five minutes.
The whole gimmick here is Juliet Jowell’s collection of letters that businesses actually received back in the day. People really had a lot of time on their hands to write nonsense to strangers. It’s like watching a Twitter feed from 1920, minus the electricity and the constant anxiety.
Some of these letters are genuinely baffling. You read them and wonder what kind of life the writer was living. Was it the air? Was it the lack of television? One letter in particular—I won’t spoil the contents—made me laugh out loud because of how confidently wrong the person was about a basic household item.
It’s not as polished as The Girl Who Came Back, but that’s clearly not the point. The film doesn't try to be a masterpiece. It just wants to show you the stuff that people thought was worth a stamp and an envelope back then. It’s oddly humble in its lack of ambition.
There’s a strange disconnect watching this in the modern day. We get our "dumb-bell letters" in comment sections now, usually involving way more typos and way less effort. There is something almost charming about someone sitting down with a fountain pen to write something completely unhinged to a shoe company.
It’s not going to change your life. It won't top any "best of" lists. But if you’re tired of modern stuff that feels like it was focus-grouped into oblivion, this is a nice, weird palette cleanser. It’s basically just paper and ego, and sometimes that’s enough. ✉️