Venice Review: Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard Is a Strange, Earnestly Heartfelt Oddity 

Past a certain age and a certain number of features, a director will almost inevitably be embroiled in that stifling debate: have they reached their “late” style yet? What that means exactly can be tricky to articulate: writing about Beethoven, Theodor Adorno viewed late works of art as “devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny”—masterful distillations of one’s craft pared down until the end result is sheared to the point of impenetrability. Two days from now, Werner Herzog will turn 84. Bucking Fastard, his latest feature in an ever-expanding filmography, is his first work of fiction since 2019’s Family Romance LLC, about the titular Japanese company renting actors to stand in for any person the customer desires. But nothing about it suggests an artist trying to strip down their approach, much less sculpt something that’s intransigent or confrontational. Bucking Fastard is an unwieldy, singular oddity to behold, but also a work animated by childlike wonder for its strange subjects and the strange world around them. There’s an earnestness that makes it hard to write off as a minor doodle from a man who’s spent his prodigious career evangelizing about “the ecstatic truth.”

Genuinely ecstatic moments are few and far between here, yet Bucking Fastard hangs in the same nebulous realm of its predecessors. True to his MO, Herzog ditches the maligned “accountant’s truth” of hard facts to arrive at the emotional core of his subject, and the result is a film in which nothing ever looks or feels entirely real. The premise is, though. Loosely based on the curious case of the Chaplin sisters—identical twins who wore the same clothes, walked in step, and spoke in unison—Bucking Fastard kicks off by restaging the trial that found the siblings guilty of stalking their next-door neighbor, a truck driver they became hopelessly, obsessively besotted with.

But in Herzog’s hands, the whole thing morphs from a Lanthimos-adjacent drama into a kind of fairytale. Here, the truck driver is an affluent cad and chronic tippler played by Orlando Bloom, and the sisters—“not twins!” as they keep barking at strangers, a near-Siamese entity nonetheless—are one half Kate and the other Rooney Mara. Jean (Kate) and Joan (Rooney) first saw the man through their fence as he lay drunk and snoring on his lawn, a sight that must have hypnotized them both (for whatever reason) because a chance encounter days later gave way to a tryst, then an improbable love triangle, and finally an obsession. “Is it a crime to love?” the young women ask a dumbfounded court at the outset. Likely not, though it is one to set fire to your lover’s SUV in retaliation for them ditching you for someone else, or driving said car at full speed in a public space in hopes of killing you both. 

Herzog, who managed to meet the Chaplins before their deaths, has said what drew him to the duo wasn’t that incendiary romance, but the fact that the two were the only known twins who spoke synchronously. And though seeing the real-life Mara siblings move and speak as one might be this film’s weirdest element, the sisters’ act never grows exhausting. It may take a moment to adjust to their simultaneous chatter, but there’s an irreducible tension between the two women—and the actresses who embody them—that makes their union a highly volatile, staticky relationship, and Herzog mines their joint activities (vacuuming, making tea, or opening a can of sardines before a friendly counselor played with saint-like patience by Domhnall Gleeson) for some surreal choreographies. 

Yet nothing about Bucking Fastard evokes its immense strangeness quite like its aesthetic. Peter Zeitlinger—Herzog’s cinematographer since the mid-1990s—shot most of it on a gimbal; the long, unbroken sequences permitted by the stabilizer give the film a liquid, sinuous quality, and the camera’s sweeping, floating movements a kind of jazzy, improvisational energy. “Everything in this world confuses me,” a character disconsolately quips halfway through. Easy enough to relate, though the disorienting feeling might catch you a lot earlier than that—long, long before Bucking Fastard swaps the nondescript Irish suburbia of its first half to catapult you into a postcard-green countryside where Jean and Joan seek refuge after the umpteenth scandal only to become fixated on a tunnel carved into a nearby hill, which legend says was built as a magical passageway to the far-flung Orkney Islands. 

Still, the greatest confusion, and source of the film’s mystique, lies squarely on its author. For the neophyte, Bucking Fastard might play as an ungainly farce; for the Herzog connoisseur, it will present some head-scratching taxonomical concerns. How on earth do you fit a work like this into a filmography like his? It’s easy to wag your fingers at some of its most baffling aspects—the sight of Orlando Bloom playing Colin Farrell playing a sozzled Lothario, say, or the clichés littering Herzog’s Irish travelogue, from the sisters’ aunt suggesting they name a rescued fox “Leprechaun” (why not?) to the Condé Nast traveller-level fetishizing of all the verdant landscape. Where are the enigmas, the sense of mystery, the communion between the earthly and otherworldly that anchored this director’s finest?

All legitimate questions. But if I cannot bring myself to dismiss Bucking Fastard entirely, it is not out of auteurist reverence, but because the wide-eyed romanticism that permeates it feels genuine, heartfelt, and occasionally infectious. Herzog—like his late, longtime friend Bruce Chatwin—is an irredeemable fabulist and artist whose oeuvre thrives off the blurring of fact and fiction. And with his latest, he’s turned the real story of two outcasts into a fable that wears its treacliness proudly on its sleeves. To complain about the film’s more sentimental detours would be to gloss over the incongruous vitality it communicates. I say incongruous because I myself am not immune to the same logic that drives much of the conversation around late style—the idea that longevity should equate to hermeticism, that old age should spawn projects so shorn and honed they feel almost cool to the touch.

Bucking Fastard is none of that. There is something thrilling about an octogenarian filmmaker trying to have fun with their material, rules and, mistakes be damned, a director trying to reinvent themselves at each new film. Toward the end, Jean and Joan decide to keep digging their way to the Orkneys—an impossible feat that spans years. “Aren’t you afraid of the enormity of your task?” their aunt worries. “Everybody should dig a tunnel through a mountain,” comes the unanimous reply. It’s the kind of line that could sum up this film just as well as the fearless spirit of its maker. 

Bucking Fastard premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.