Werner Herzog’s new film, “Bucking Fastard,” premieres to polarizing reviews at Venice, featuring Kate and Rooney Mara as sisters who behave, speak, and react in unison. The movies’ central premise follows the twins as they move and communicate together, framed as a love-driven, whimsical fable.
Across outlets, critics describe the work as eccentric and difficult to categorize, combining elements of mock-Irish storytelling with technically complex staging. IndieWire characterizes it as touching yet weird and unclassifiable, while Variety highlights the Mara sisters’ synchronized performance and describes the film as having a shifting or multiple-personality feel. The Hollywood Reporter similarly emphasizes the “weirdness” of the tale and the siblings’ tunnel-through-a-mountain setup, noting that the story is nutty but not fully developed in the way viewers might expect.
Together, the sources converge on the film’s distinctive concept and performance technique, while differing on how consistently the overall execution holds together, with some finding it sublime at moments and others viewing it as thin or uneven.
