In case it hasn’t been clear, or, like a normal person, you aren’t obsessed with my media consumption, I decided recently that I was tired of complaining about how I don’t watch movies any more, and instead I was going to watch more movies. And because nothing in my life can’t be mined for blog content, I might as well review them too. I missed last week, but this weekend’s movie (or today’s, at least; maybe I’ll make up for last week tomorrow) was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, written and directed by the Coens.

I only know this movie exists because of TikTok, which has served up numerous snippets of Tim Blake Nelson’s titular Buster Scruggs, a white-garbed, polysyllabic desperado with a penchant for murderous improvisation and bursting into song at the slightest provocation. What I didn’t realize was that this movie is actually six unrelated vignettes, all set in the Old West, with the framing device of a book of short stories called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Sadly, the book itself is fictional; each vignette begins and ends with a slow pan into the first or last page of the story, and what text that’s there aroused my attention and would surely have acquired my money had the book actually existed to be bought.

The stories themselves range from the comic and musical (Scruggs) to what really feels like supernatural horror (The Mortal Remains) to a couple that are more firmly reality-based and tend toward the dark and depressing. The second, Near Algodones, is the only near-miss of the bunch; James Franco’s bank robber character is not terribly interesting, and while the visual of a deranged bank teller protecting himself from gunshots with armor made from cast-iron pans is hilarious, the story is slight enough that I couldn’t remember it just now and had to look for a list of the vignettes to get myself to six.

As it turned out, I had already unknowingly seen Scruggs nearly in its entirety on TikTok, and I was a little worried after Algodones, but the last four vignettes are uniformly fascinating and well worth the cost of a subscription to Netflix and two hours out of my Saturday. If you like Westerns or the Coens’ previous output, it’s well worth your time.