Review: Bucking Fastard
- VENICE 2026: Werner Herzog's latest sees Ireland as the setting for an absurd fable on identity, inspired by the extraordinary real-life Chaplin twins, from York
Some lives seem to belong to a Werner Herzog film even before Herzog gets anywhere near them. Bucking Fastard, one of this year’s competition titles at the Venice Film Festival, takes its starting point from Freda and Greta Chaplin, the identical twins from York whose uncanny closeness – they dressed alike, moved together and could speak in unison – made them a minor British sensation in the early 1980s. Herzog transforms that strange true story into a contemporary Irish fable about Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters determined to exist almost as a single person, until the question becomes whether such unity is liberation, imprisonment or simply their own way of being.
At its centre, the film is about identity, but Herzog treats the subject with such playfulness that its ideas often arrive disguised as nonsense. The sisters speak in unison, move with odd, ritualised synchrony, and inhabit the world according to rules that make perfect sense to them and only partial sense to everyone else. Kate Mara and Rooney Mara lean completely into this register, giving deliberately cartoonish, fantastical performances. Their Irishness, shared rhythms and even their silliness belong to the same storybook logic.
The cast is clearly having enormous fun – sometimes perhaps too much. There is an occasional whiff of self-satisfaction to the performances, as if Herzog and his actors shared a private code whose subtler meanings never quite come across to the viewer. Domhnall Gleeson fits neatly into the same eccentric framework, whilst Orlando Bloom, as the sisters’ former shared lover, adds another layer of absurdity. The film is not incomprehensible; rather, certain emotional and thematic ideas feel insufficiently unpacked. Herzog half-opens the door to this peculiar world without always giving us the key to do so fully.
This is where Bucking Fastard occasionally falters. Herzog’s touch is unmistakable: ironic, experienced and wise, but never obvious. His wisdom comes through abstraction, jokes and absurd gestures, almost as though philosophy were being delivered as an extended punchline. There is something genuinely poetic in that refusal to explain too much, yet the film repeatedly seems on the verge of a greater emotional detonation.
One keeps waiting for its ideas about identity, desire, solitude and shared existence to suddenly click into place and become overwhelming. That moment never fully arrives. The end result remains charming, amusing and often beautiful, but slightly superficial, floating just above the emotional depths it continually suggests.
Visually, Herzog is on particularly strong form. DoP Peter Zeitlinger's green tones dominate, inevitably evoking Ireland’s image as the Emerald Isle, particularly in the rural interiors, landscapes and striking final passages set in caves. The country feels at once physical and mythical, grounded and enchanted. That tension is reinforced by Ernst Reijseger’s splendid score, which evokes a land of elves and supernatural creatures while remaining rooted in something spiritual yet stubbornly earthy.
At 109 minutes, the movie is hardly overlong by Venice standards, although it could still benefit from being tightened in places. Some repetitions of tone dilute, rather than deepen, its effect. The ending, however, lands well, and the journey retains enough charm and coherence to make Bucking Fastard an easy film to like.
Herzog has made something witty, strange and visually seductive. It never quite becomes the emotional revelation it seems poised to be, but it remains a distinctive, pleasurable late-career work from a filmmaker still capable of turning absurdity into something akin to wisdom.
Bucking Fastard was produced by Providence Road Entertainment (USA) and Gateway to Orkney (Ireland). British firm HanWay Films handles the pic's world sales.
Photogallery 03/09/2026: Venice 2026 - Bucking Fastard
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© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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