Bucking Fastard: Herzog’s tale of two sisters who speak in unison is his best fiction feature in years

• Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Werner Herzog’s latest eccentric yarn is probably his best fiction feature since he had his second coming in the 2000s as a kind of superhero Teutonic auteur. Then he followed documentary hits like Grizzly Man (2005) with an unlikely Bad Lieutenant (2009) reboot starring maximum-strength Nicolas Cage (somehow launching a franchise). Now, the 84-year-old filmmaker follows some stiffly ruddered documentaries with another fiction galvanized by an outré central performance: sisters Rooney and Kate Mara as Jean and Joan Holbrooke, outsider sisters who speak in unison. 

Set in present-day Ireland, Bucking Fastard is a curious combination of the pathologies Herzog explored in the 1970s (e.g., in his 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) with a more antic approach, at times almost screwball, yet reaching some poignant behavioral and emotional truths. Rooney and Kate Mara’s double act render the film mesmerising right up until its storytelling lurches to a rattling close. 

Our introduction to the Holbrookes is nearly tabloid in nature: a raucous court trial on charges stemming from their unwilling break-up with neighbor Mulrooney (Orlando Bloom) whom they’d been besotted with. “I’d love to show you my inner cowgirl,” they tell him, bewilderingly, in a flashback (and it’s usually “they,” even when saying words like “Well”). But Herzog steers away from titillation and into their ardent interruptions, which bemuse the court, and the sisters seem to evoke a contemporary myth inherently, supported by details like the dividing wall that separates their garden from Mulrooney’s, which they rise and lower in order to visit their rakish neighbour. 

But that screwball opening is a bit of a feint, since the story turns to the absurdities of their getting through life and, later, finding purpose in the world. Moving away because of a restraining order taking out against them by Mulroney, they rent a flat for free from an overprotective widower, one in a series of people who either look kindly upon them or unsettle their trust. Domhnall Gleeson steps into the film to play a seemingly part-time social worker who’s one of the goodies, talking them through such obstacles as opening a sardine can without getting their hands in a pretzel (“We could not do it!”). Meanwhile, they learn somebody might be filming them through their bedroom window – a moment which served to remind that, despite the 19th-century-case-study ring of their predicament, they do live in the era of internet. 

The sardine can is of course an exercise in prising apart their folie a deux, yet the logic of their united worldview proves a hard chain to break. Rooney and Kate Mara – introduced by a credit that fades one name away to reveal the other – have an unfakeable family resemblance and a rapport that stays odd but also sweet (where either actor’s back catalogue shows they could tap something much more twisted). Their simultaneous speech underlines their bond (one bridge further than finishing each other’s sentences) but also bear echoes of a Greek chorus, especially when declaring their undying love for Mulrooney.  

In their hands, the sometimes-childlike Jean and Joan never appear entirely helpless or turn into cartoon caricatures, despite further concoctions by Herzog (whose screenplay was partly inspired by real-life sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin). In the film’s back half, they join their concerned Aunt Louise in the verdant countryside, who puts them to work around her cottage, and take care of a crazy-eyed fox. But the film’s third act, and its equally most absurd and meaningful stretch, is the sisters’ obsessive mission to dig a tunnel into a mountain, which, perhaps needless to say, they undertake by hand (in a strange echo of another pair of sisters at Venice this year, the wall-drilling duo of Rami Kodeih’s film Furies). 

This is the kind of thing that might have happened in a 1980s American sitcom as it neared to jumping the shark. But this self-imposed task also clinches the story as a kind of broken fairy tale, portending a dead end for the sisters after somehow making do for years. Their workmanlike focus is perfectly suited for the tunnelling endeavour, but they’re also about to reach the end of their rope (and absent a Herzogian documentary narration to lend a fatalistic fervour to it all).  

One of the lines in the film sticks in the mind at this point – “There must be a place for us somewhere” – and there is an answer to this quandary in the finale. What Herzog does with Jean and Joan’s final predicament crystallises Bucking Fastard as a tough but welcome alternative to an entire tradition of movies about finding your place in the world.