‘Ghost Elephants’ Review: Werner Herzog Adds Characteristic Existential Poignancy to Entertaining Nature Doc [B] Venice
Werner Herzog’s irreverent stoicism, which seems to get an ounce cheekier every year, does some heavy lifting in a documentary which might otherwise border on self-serious. As the South African naturalist Dr Steve Boyes stares lovingly and longingly up at a scaffolded rendering of “Henry”, the biggest elephant ever found – and hunted – by man, Herzog is ready to dismantle his dream. The very first question asked of Boyes is a version of “Will finding these elusive animals really make you happy?” It’s a refrain that becomes a theme for Herzog – after all, existential application of his weird and wacky characters is necessary in this game. He asks the question a couple times more of Boyes, who is sincere enough to answer it as a sort of vibe check.
Things don’t always go right on Boyes’s cross-country, weeks-long trek to find the world’s biggest land mammals, a gigantic form of elephant that dwells at high altitudes in an inhabitably wet part of Angola that’s nicknamed “The Source of Life”. That isn’t an exaggeration: the area the size of England is where most of Africa’s longest rivers, including the Zambezi and the Congo, begin. The elephants’ choice to dwell in a place so hard to reach is what makes them “ghosts”. The title is ironic, with Boyes and his team seeking to bring the animals out of the shadows and into the known realm.
“Henry” was shot and killed by a South African hunter helped by trackers, the same vanishing profession who will assist Boyes. (Herzog points out that one of them, Xui, can read elephant tracks in the sand as we would read a newspaper.) So what’s Boyes’s motivation? We don’t really learn. But that’s partly the point: Herzog uses the mystery to repeat his question of whether it’s all worth it. At the midpoint of the final, week-long walk to the plain, a tired and weary Boyes says: “I’m not going to learn anything from a ghost elephant. Maybe it’s better to keep it as a dream. But we humans… we chase dreams.”
The nature documentary perhaps isn’t Herzog’s home turf, but this isn’t entirely unfamiliar territory. He made Grizzly Man twenty years ago about a similarly fixated, singularly focused bear seeker. This is less life and death – and Boyes’s squad are the best of the best – but the intrigue in the obsessed remains. That film was funded by Discovery and this one Disney (via National Geographic), so the natural world is a place where Herzog has found some resource. The same is true for Boyes, whose undertaking ultimately involves substantial collaboration with the Smithsonian, the University of California, Stanford, trackers from Namibia, a footballer-turned-anthropologist, a tribe in Angola and even a local king whose blessing – quite literally – the team must be given if they’re going to succeed. (And if they do, it’ll be the King’s blessing that did it.)
But despite that unwieldy process, which even Herzog at times struggles to keep his grip on, it’s the small moments which are the most poignant for the director. A member of an ancient tribe in Namibia who looks after animals and makes his own instruments. Herzog suspends his monotone for a moment to say with genuine emotion: “I know I should not romanticise this, but surrounded by chickens, I feel it cannot get any better than this.”
Ghost Elephants is a consistently entertaining and thought-provoking look at a quest for the elusive, and why we bother. It’s also a crucial documentation of a way of being that’s not long for this world: the Namibian trackers trained in their way of life can be counted on one hand, and their clicking language is spoken these days by very few. Boyes points out that the tribe is the world’s oldest civilisation, and the source of life to us. But its tiny scale and the ease with which its members can now go elsewhere leaves it vulnerable. Herzog doesn’t have time to focus much on this, nor the hunt for the elephants, nor the exploration of Boyes’s motivations. There are two or three films in that. But as a life-affirming and often funny look at a place and a way of living that is as foreign to us as can be, Ghost Elephants is something to be grateful for.
Grade: B
This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
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