Sisters Doing It For Themselves: Herzog Returns with Theater of the Bizarre
Until quite recently, it was a foregone conclusion legendary director Werner Herzog would not be able to make his long gestating feature Bucking Fastard, detailed amongst several other unmade projects in his 2022 memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. As fate would have it, the curious endeavor, which fits perfectly within Herzog’s oeuvre littered with weird humans and/or natural environmental wonders, came to fruition with the novel casting of sisters Rooney and Kate Mara, who seem to be reveling in this strange absurdity as a pair of dysfunctional siblings who speak in unison and behave as if they were conjoined. It’s (very loosely) inspired by English identical twin sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin, who, in the 1980s, were served a restraining order from a man they’d become sexually involved with, which turned into toxic infatuation. The title comes from a spoonerism they uttered in court to describe him. It’s merely the tip of the iceberg for where Herzog sails off to.
Sisters Jean (Kata Mara) and Joan Holbrooke (Rooney Mara) are inseparable to the degree where they cannot be differentiated, something which seemingly led them to be abandoned by their parents. On their own in Ireland, where they share the same dreams and perform every conceivable task together, their obsessive behavior has landed them in court for the harassment of their neighbor and ex-lover, Gareth (Orlando Bloom). Having recently married his girlfriend Gladys, Gareth has cut off sexual ties with the sisters, which has led to acts of vandalism. The court case has brought a great degree of notoriety, but thankfully, the sisters are able to drift into a wave of human kindness as they relocate to a kindly patron’s furnished room. Eventually, they’re invited to live with their widowed aunt on her country estate, where she introduces them to a network of ancient caves, which will eventually come to define the young women. When officials from the local county Health Department arrive to annihilate the local fox population for suspicion of rabies, the sisters save a lone fox, which inadvertently leads them into another adventure entirely.
There’s an element of a Greek chorus in the performances of the Mara sisters, both who embrace the strangeness gleefully, which conjures a camp element for those who will enjoy watching them be perverse little freaks. Their characterizations are completely in keeping with Herzog’s filmography of social outcasts, people who build their own worlds for themselves in stark contrast to the reality around them. While akin in tone to Herzog’s more modern explorations (such as Family Romance, LLC, 2019) in at least as much as he’s superficially immersed in a foreign culture (Japan, Ireland, etc.), it also plays like a throwback to his wildly provocative films from the 1970s, specifically Stroszek (1977), in which a German alcoholic recently released from prison is determined to make a fresh start in Wisconsin with a decrepit friend and prostitute in tow.
But a replay of his extensive motifs is pushed much further, including, naturally, prominent animal elements, such as a shared dream involving caged birds, but more provocatively, a victimized fox (which, unlike D.H. Lawrence’s metaphorical usage, rather than driving a lesbian couple apart, seems to bring these strange sisters ever closer to achieving an impossible love connection). They’re so impossibly dysfunctional, they might as well be living out the prologue to Macbeth as two thirds of the ‘weird sisters,’ though any comparisons to symbiotic siblings feels apropos. At times, when Herzog leans into the levity, this feels like it could have been a John Waters package used to sully the Olsen twins. They are, interestingly, just a pivot away from June and Jennifer Gibbons, examined by Agnieszka Smoczynska in 2022’s The Silent Twins.
Herzog sends us back into his Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) obsession as if to suggest these women hearken back to an original source of human creativity in their obsessive bid to tunnel their way through a mountain and create a new passage to Orkney. The film is fittingly dedicated to David Lynch (who served as EP on the underrated My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, 2009) who likely would have appreciated the film’s final riddle we leave the sisters to somehow solve for themselves.
A return to cult status form for Herzog, Bucking Fastard finds his frequent DP Peter Zeitlinger (let’s not forget Grizzly Man, 2005, as another odyssey on a similar wavelength) somehow making modern day Ireland sometimes align with the Saharan vistas of Fata Morgana (1971). Likewise the significant contributions of a playful score from Ernst Reijseger (who, much like Terence Blanchard to Spike Lee, somehow creates a score tying all the jarring elements beautifully together to underline thematic cohesion). Those being initiated to Herzog through Bucking Fastard will hopefully embrace the blazing embers of his idiosyncratic signature and dig further into his other glories while his mainstays will hopefully regard this late period weirdness as ducking felightful.
Reviewed on September 3rd at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 109 Minutes.
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
