Werner Herzog has spent a career walking toward people who live at the edge of what the rest of us call sense. In Bucking Fastard, he finds two of them at once. Kate Mara and Rooney Mara play Jean and Joan Holbrooke, twin sisters so close they speak in unison, love the same man, and dream the same dreams. They even make the same slip of the tongue at the same moment. The film runs 109 minutes and premiered in the main competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 3 September 2026, where it competed for the Golden Lion.
Trailer, via HanWay Films.
Two Sisters Who Speak as One
The premise is simple and strange. Jean and Joan Holbrooke go looking for an imaginary land where true love is possible. Their method is not prayer or travel. They start digging a tunnel through a mountain range. That is the engine of the film, and Herzog never treats it as a joke. The sisters are not fools. They are certain, and certainty is what makes them dangerous to everyone around them.
The script, also by Herzog, is loosely based on the lives of Freda and Greta Chaplin. That word “loosely” is doing real work. The film is not a biography. It takes the shape of a true story and bends it toward the mythic. What we get is a pair of women the world cannot classify, and a world that keeps trying anyway.
We never see the world as the sisters see it. Herzog makes that choice early and holds it. Instead we watch how the world reacts to them. Through the courts. Through the press. Through people who want to help and people who want to use them. Through the eyes of beasts, tame and wild. And through their own echoes in the core of the earth. That last image is the one the film keeps returning to, and it is the one that stays.
Kate Mara and Rooney Mara in Unison
The casting is the film’s smartest move. When the two speak together, the effect is not a gimmick. It is unsettling in the right way. The unison delivery strips the individual out of each line. You stop hearing two people and start hearing one voice with two mouths.
Rooney Mara plays Joan. Kate Mara plays Jean. The film does not work hard to tell them apart, and that is deliberate. They are not two characters. They are one character with a doubled face, and the world’s inability to separate them is the whole problem. When the courts get involved, the question of who did what becomes impossible to answer. That is the point.
Orlando Bloom plays Gareth Mulroney, the man both sisters love. Domhnall Gleeson plays Timothy. Hugh O’Conor plays Counsel, Simon Delaney plays Judge, and John Kavanagh plays Mr. Westmoreland. Marion O’Dwyer plays Auntie Louise, and Brendan Conroy plays McFarlane. The supporting cast is large and the film spreads them thin. Several of them exist only to react, which is the film’s structure but also its weakness.
A Tunnel Through the Mountain
The tunnel is the film’s central image and its central problem. It is a literal dig through rock, and Herzog shoots it as labor, not metaphor. The sisters work. They move earth. The mountain does not care about their imaginary land, and the film does not pretend it does.
What the tunnel means is left open. It could be faith. It could be madness. It could be love, which in this film is the same thing as both. Herzog does not explain, and the film is better for it. The problem is that 109 minutes is a long time to hold an image without advancing it. The middle of Bucking Fastard sags. The dig continues. The courts continue. The press continues. The film circles.
Here is how the film’s major elements line up against each other:
| Element | What the film does | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| The unison speech | Defines the sisters as one | Blurs them past the point of drama |
| The tunnel | Gives the film its image | Stalls the middle third |
| The courts and press | Externalize the conflict | Reduce supporting cast to reactors |
| The beasts | Add wildness and threat | Arrive late, resolve little |
| The earth’s core echoes | Deliver the film’s best image | Never fully pay off |
The table is not a knock. Herzog is building something deliberate. But a film that withholds this much has to earn the withholding, and Bucking Fastard only partly does.
The Courts, the Press, and the Beasts
The courtroom scenes are the film’s most conventional and its most effective. Counsel and Judge are not characters so much as forces. They represent the world’s demand that the sisters be legible. The sisters refuse. The press wants a story. The sisters give it nothing it can use. Gareth Mulroney sits between them, loved by both, belonging to neither.
The beasts are the strangest addition. Tame and wild, they watch the sisters with something like recognition. Here they carry a weight the human supporting cast cannot. When a wild thing looks at Jean and Joan, you believe it sees them. When a person does, you believe the person is calculating.
The echoes in the core of the earth are the film’s best idea and its least developed. The image lands. The meaning does not. Herzog gives us the sound of the sisters coming back to themselves from below, and then the film moves on. It is a haunting that never quite becomes a thesis.
What Venice Saw
Bucking Fastard premiered in the main competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 3 September 2026. It competed for the Golden Lion. That is the right stage for it. This is a Herzog film down to the last frame. It is a drama and a comedy at once, and it never settles into either.
The festival run matters here because the film is built for a room that will sit with it. On a smaller screen, the slowness will read as a flaw. In a festival hall, it reads as patience. That is not a defense of the film. It is a description of what kind of film it is.
The Tunnel, the Courts, and the Score
Bucking Fastard is a real film with a real vision and a real hole in its middle. The Mara sisters are the reason to see it. Their unison work is the best thing in the movie, and it is the thing the movie is actually about. Everything else — the tunnel, the courts, the beasts, the echoes — exists to frame that performance, and not all of it earns its place.
The comparison that matters is not to other 2026 releases. It is to Herzog’s own best work, where the obsession and the story move at the same speed. Here the obsession runs ahead. The dig is compelling. The film around it is not always.
This is the part worth watching: the sisters, speaking as one, refusing to be split. That is the movie. The rest is scaffolding. The score is 6.1 of 10.
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