‘Bucking Fastard’ Review: The Mara Sisters Commit to Werner Herzog’s Wonderfully Weird Bit as Lovestruck Twins Who Move and Speak in Unison

Look at any paparazzi shot of the Olsen twins, and they move almost as mirror images of each other, usually in lockstep, almost never seen apart. Imagine that dynamic cast with Rooney and Kate Mara as identical twins tossed into a loopy Irish fable about belonging, romantic obsession, and being separated only at birth, and you’ve got the makings of documentarian/fabulist Werner Herzog‘s wonderfully bizarre comedy, “Bucking Fastard.” What a shame the phrase folie à deux has now been indelibly tainted by another (but far less intrepid or imaginative) movie that once premiered at Venice, because that’s the psychic wavelength (Kate) and Jean (Rooney) Holbrooke are vibing on: the lovable madness of separate people living inside a shared mind. Jean and Joan, talk, move, love, and fuck in unison — and at first with the same man, the appealingly rakish Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom), whom they meet in church and entreat to a shed. Surprise: He’s their neighbor, and they become so fixated on him in tandem that they haul out a crank to raise a portion of the fence dividing them. That’ll prove portentous in about an hour and change once they’re digging a tunnel to the Orkney Islands off Scotland, in search of something else more ineffable, but partly another romantic suitor. The Holbrooke sisters have a puerile attachment to flirtation and sex that yields in devious shared smirks and puns on the word “come” and “cum.” That are, again, all spoken at the same time, in a manner that could grate the nerves coming from the hands of any other filmmaker, but Herzog is entirely sincere and irony-free in his handling. He’s not a pathologist who treats the Holbrookes as a freakshow curio — approaching the sisters as he would any of even his most polarizing protagonists across fiction and nonfiction, like Timothy Treadwell the bear whisperer, or Nicolas Cage as a very bad lieutenant, or the mad-raving Klaus Kinski in either “Fitzcarraldo” or its making-of doc, “Burden of Dreams.” With “Bucking Fastard,” either you’re on the train, or you want to get off it fast. Carnality leads to voyeurism leads to arson leads to a restraining order as the Holbrooke sisters find themselves sitting court in a stalking trial in front of plump, white-wigged magistrates. How long Gareth had been their neighbor, how long he’d been married to another woman before he had a psyche-exploding threesome with the frisky and libidinous Holbrookes, who only wanted to show him their “inner cowgirl,” who cares. There’s about as much logic here as the drawn map of a dream, and “Bucking Fastard” moves in a picaresque trot from one vignette to another — from the city of Dublin where they’re put into state-sanctioned housing post-trial, to a faraway farm where a long-lost aunt puts them to work. ‘Bucking Fastard’Venice Film Festival Throughout, they wear their hair the same (pinned back), their clothes the same (like runaway bridesmaids out of a Mennonite cult), and share the same bed. Standing two abreast, their outfits and physical comportment are directly symmetrical: You could draw a line between them, fold the image in half at the crease, and both sides would more or less superimpose perfectly. The differences in Kate and Rooney’s faces and physiognomies slowly start to disappear. That’s how locked in the Maras are to each other, the material, and their filmmaker. (They aren’t real-life twins; Kate was born two years before Rooney.) While living in Dublin, the Holbrookes are assigned to a kind of social worker (Domhnall Gleeson) whose task is to separate them bit by bit. You might more than chuckle when the Holbrookes try and fail to vacuum in concert using the same machine, or when they’re both vainly attempting to open a tin of sardines, an awkward tangle of fingers and frustration. You don’t need two people to screw in a lightbulb, but these women will damn try. Not to prove anybody wrong, but because they don’t know another way. Herzog conceived of the screenplay with his producer Ariel León Isacovitch during, of course, an eight-night tour of Patagonia, realizing an idea he’d been kicking around for a while. He was inspired by the true story of Freda and Greta Chaplin, who in the 1980s stirred up a media frenzy for harassing a truck driver, and for bizarrely mirroring each other. Herzog is probably aware, too, of Bridgette and Paula Powers, identical twin Australian bird rehabilitators who went viral in 2016 for a “Good Morning Britain” in which they finished each other’s sentences recounting a carjacking incident. For the first time ever, Herzog rehearsed with his actors prior to shooting “Bucking Fastard,” to get these sisters in sync like an impish two-woman Greek chorus. But did he need it? Probably not; these women carry so much shared history into the film anyway. Their in-stereo speak here becomes oddly mellifluous. Who else could have played the Holbrookes? No one. Stationing his camera on a gimbal with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, “Bucking Fastard” moves and flows throughout rooms and along landscapes and eventually in a cave of forgotten dreams like Herzog’s finest documentary work — the ones where what he seeks is not reality in front of a film lens, but the heightened, ecstatic truth of the images that the camera constitutes by virtue of its presence, and his. And that camera is not without a desire to wander, like onto a lone porcupine waddling in the street during a particularly invasive act of trespass. And watch out for a rumored-to-be-rabid fox called Cupid. Herzog the fatalist, who once made a movie about a suicidal penguin, “Bucking Fastard” is not. Finally, “Bucking Fastard” ends on a note that quite literally shuts us out of the door upon the Holbrookes that’s been opened, the sisters’ journey toward a sense of belonging in a world other than each other’s left unfinished. Why shouldn’t it? The 83-year-old Herzog’s wryly funny, touchingly eccentric, and uncompromisingly batshit feature — wait, aren’t they all like that? — will enchant and dismay in likely equivalent proportions. Grade: B+ “Bucking Fastard” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.