A pair of sisters who often speak in unison struggle in a world inhospitable to their strangeness in 2026's Bucking Fastard. Werner Herzog directs this film loosely based on a real life pair of twin sisters. The film is dedicated to the late David Lynch and in many ways it's reminiscent of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, the project on which Herzog and Lynch collaborated. Segments of the film that focus on the salacious, real world story are paired with other scenes in which the main character(s) dreamily contemplate the beauty and strangeness of reality. It's an aesthetic attitude that not many people have an appetite for--most critics don't quite know how to appreciate beauty, so many of the reviews for both films have failed to find much of value in them. This fittingly parallels the lives of the sisters in the film, whose difficulties stem from a world that cannot empathise with their priorities. For me, this film was incredible; it is an effective, melancholy meditation on lives cursed with being out of step with society, lives that few are willing to see humanity in.
The first part of the film focuses on the most salacious true story attached to the pair, their obsession with a man who'd been their sexual partner, but who had eventually gotten a restraining order put out on them after their failure to cope with his marriage to another woman had caused them to harass him. We see them throwing garbage bags onto the windscreen of his car and setting fire to his mailbox.
In real life, the pair of sisters were twins--you can see footage of them in TV documentaries from the '80s. Herzog sets the film in the modern day, complete with internet and touch screens, factors that play important roles in the film's story. The sisters are also not twins, as they directly state in the movie, despite the Wikipedia entry erroneously referring to them as twins. They're played by real life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara. Herzog also moves the location from Yorkshire, England, to County Kildare, Ireland.
The Mara sisters give an incredible performance that must have been very difficult to achieve. Their speaking most of the time in unison seems different from how the real life sisters spoke in unison. In the brief bits of footage I could find of them on YouTube, the real life pair watch each other a lot and look for confirmation and cues. When they speak in unison, it comes off as a kind of litany, like the things they say together are lines in a play they constantly repeat. The characters played by the Mara sisters, Jean and Joan Holbrooke, seem often as though they have a single brain operating two bodies. The Mara sisters basically give two complete performances of the same character, standing next to each other, but sometimes they switch to finishing each other's sentences instead of speaking simultaneously.
They're fascinating, the viewer is compelled to wonder how their minds function. A character played by Domhnall Gleeson tries to help them. They have trouble opening a sardine can because it's not something they can do together and he slowly coaxes one of them into doing it alone. But any time one is distinguished from the other, either visually or through actions, it causes them both profound distress. Setting the story in modern times adds another dimension to the story. An old man whose home they're staying in is shocked to find nude pictures of them on the internet, taken by a voyeur on the roof across the street from their bedroom window. When the old man informs them, they can't believe him because, as they tell him, they don't have internet. He slowly realises that they think if they don't have internet, then pictures of them can't be on the internet.
In both real life and in the film, the sisters must lead a very simple life in order to maintain their synchronicity. Though they're taken as simple-minded, it must actually take a great deal of mental acuity to maintain their mirror act, but even so they likely must keep the parameters narrow. So this fosters a very simple outlook on life which is doubtless why they're given to fervent romantic ideas. This is what makes them classic Herzog protagonists. They'll go to any lengths for their goals because they have thoroughly unshakable convictions. They have to, to maintain their unison.
The final act of the film is the cosiest piece of filmmaking I've seen from Herzog. The sisters move out to the countryside to stay with a widow in her cottage. They spend their time around local caves that command a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. When a local rich hunter tries to slaughter all the local foxes, the sisters keep one whom they name Cupid. Cupid leads them, and the film, into a symbolic realm in which the influence of David Lynch becomes clearer. It also solidifies the point of the story. The same obsessions that allow them to find incredible beauty in the world also cut them off from it.
Bucking Fastard is playing at the New York Film Festival.