Werner Herzog’s latest ambitious cinematic feat, Bucking Fastard, allows Rooney and Kate Mara to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime performance.
Director: Werner Herzog
Genre: Drama
Run Time: 109′
Venice World Premiere: September 3, 2026
Release Date: TBA
Being a sister is a unique experience, especially when you are close in age to one another. It’s almost as if someone had cloned you and your experience but slightly, or sometimes majorly, shifted the most important details. Having a sister allows you to have an entirely new perspective on the very life you lived and yet never saw unfolding in front of you. In many ways, having a sister so close to you can serve as a one-of-a-kind reflection of your identity as a whole.
Werner Herzog’s latest fable, Bucking Fastard, utilizes this sacred bond of sisterhood to dissect themes of connection, identity, community and most importantly, love. The film is centered around sisters Jean (Kate Mara, of Imperfect Women) and Joan (Rooney Mara, of La Cocina) Holbrooke, who share a bond so close they naturally speak in sync with one another. Everything the girls do, they do together.
They dress in the same clothes, eat the same food and even love the same man, their next-door neighbor Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom, of The Cut). While Gareth is initially, and lustfully, enamoured by the Holbrooke sisters, he grows bored of them in favor of pursuing a marriage to another woman. Jean and Joan, feeling both heartbroken and scorned, leave their home for the first time for a fresh start.
However, they find that no matter where they go, the world sees their intense connection as a spectacle to gawk at, a bond to fetishize, or a naivety to take advantage of. While a select few meet them with kindness and empathy, providing a rare warmth in the lives of these girls, they decide they must take matters into their own hands and actively seek a world in which the judgement they constantly face and the harshness the world holds have no place.
Bucking Fastard chronicles the ways in which people react and interact with the sisters, who serve as an analogy to those misunderstood by society. Within the film, Herzog’s intricately weaves together themes meant to explore the power of connection and empathy, but ultimately leaves it up to audiences to walk away with whichever message resonates most adamantly with them. While it serves as a tall ask for audience members to digest and analyze, it seems appropriate given the message serving as a major throughline of the film is about pursuing a dream regardless of how unachievable it is.
What the Mara sisters achieve in their portrayal of Jean and Joan is nothing short of revolutionary. While they are performing in sync with one another, they bring such subtle differentiations to their roles that add nuance into who the sisters are as individuals and color to the sisters as a unit. It’s differences you only notice on a microscopic level that make their connection feel based in reality, like these could be two real sisters moving through the real world. While most real sisters do not often speak in tandem to one another or dress identically every day, their performances actualize a connection that is often only felt in the bond between two sisters and rarely able to be vocalized to those outside of that bond.
Watching them process and react and even spar with one another all through glances and subtle movements embodies the beauty of being born with someone so inherently similar to yourself. It’s a tremendous feat that while Kate and Rooney never appear out of sync with one another, there appears to be an entire universe that exists in between them which they can communicate through.
Herzog’s Bucking Fastard will not be for everyone. It demands its audience to do the work to connect the dots between its motifs, symbolism and thematic elements in order to unlock the story he tells. However, even if you stick around purely for the anomaly that is Kate and Rooney Mara’s once in a lifetime performance, the film will deliver exactly what you want it to.
Bucking Fastard (2026): Movie Plot & Recap
Synopsis:
Jean and Joan Holbrooke are two sisters who are so close to one another they do everything in sync. From the way they talk, to the way they dress and even when it comes to the man they love, the girls act as one. Scorned by a world that doesn’t understand their connection, they begin to dig a tunnel under a mountain with the hope of finding a place where love can exist without judgement.
Pros:
- Rooney and Kate Mara to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime performance.
- Herzog lays the foundation to outdo even his wildest cinematic feats.
- The blocking of the film and utilization of scarce takes is something film students will study for years to come.
Cons:
- With so many nuanced and overlapping analyses of themes, the film leaves much up to the interpretation of the audience without much guidance as to what the film is hoping to leave audiences contemplating.
Bucking Fastard had its World Premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival on September 3, 2026.