Werner Herzog Has Two Sisters Digging Through a Mountain. He Has Done This Before

Orlando Bloom plays Gareth Mulroney and Domhnall Gleeson plays Timothy, with Hugh O'Conor also in the cast. Bloom is the more surprising name on that list, and the more interesting one — he has spent two decades in enormous films that asked him mostly to be handsome and brave, and almost nobody has handed him a Herzog script.

The title is something two women said at once in a courtroom

Bucking Fastard refers to a synchronised verbal slip the real sisters made in court.

The real sisters were Freda and Greta Chaplin, British identical twins who became tabloid property in the 1980s after a man they had both become involved with obtained a restraining order against them. They spoke in unison, dressed identically, and were written about for years as a curiosity rather than as two people. Herzog wrote about them in his 2022 memoir before he wrote this film.

That history is the reason to watch how this picture behaves. Two women who were treated as a spectacle by the British press are now the subject of a film whose title is a joke they did not mean to make. Herzog has renamed them, moved them to fiction, and given them a mountain to dig through — which reads less like a documentary impulse than like an attempt to hand them a myth instead of a headline. Whether that is generous or merely another use of them is the question the film has to answer for itself, and it is a real question, not a rhetorical one.

Herzog's record here is better than most. Grizzly Man took a man who had already been widely made a joke of and gave him back his contradictions without excusing him. He is capable of the necessary care. He is also capable of finding a person magnificent in a way they never asked to be.

Photo: Österreichisches Außenministerium (photo: Domen Pal) · CC BY 4.0 · source

The crew is the one he has kept for thirty years

Peter Zeitlinger shot it. Zeitlinger has been Herzog's cinematographer since the 1990s, on Grizzly Man and a long line of others, and he is the reason a Herzog exterior looks both documentary-plain and slightly wrong. Ernst Reijseger wrote the score; he has been scoring Herzog's films for two decades, usually with cello and voices arranged so that a shot of rock or water starts to feel liturgical. Marco Capalbo edited.

That continuity matters more than it sounds. Herzog's films are unpolished on purpose — they do not smooth anything down — and the people who know how to produce that effect deliberately are a small group he has kept close. Bucking Fastard runs 109 minutes.

Photo: Djm-leighpark · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Ireland, Slovenia, and a mountain that has to be believed

Principal photography ran in Ireland, at the Pigeon House studios in Dublin's docklands, in Naas in County Kildare, and on Capel Street, with further scenes shot in Slovenia. Filming wrapped in April 2025. It is Herzog's first narrative feature since Family Romance, LLC in 2019, which he shot in Tokyo about a man hired to impersonate a stranger's father.

The film was reportedly offered a Cannes slot in May and turned it down, which is a small thing that says something. Venice puts it in competition against Danny Boyle, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Martin McDonagh, Casey Affleck and Florian Zeller, with Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding over the jury.

The prize is not the point. A man in his eighties has made a picture about two women trying to dig their way to a country that does not exist, and cast two actual sisters to do the digging. Whatever the jury decides when the festival closes on September 12, someone went out and shot that. On the Lido, on September 3, the tunnel gets its first audience.

• Fitzcarraldo1982 · Werner Herzog
• Grizzly Man2005 · Werner Herzog
• Family Romance, LLC2019 · Werner Herzog