Dir: Werner Herzog. USA. 2025. 99’
In his latest film Werner Herzog travels to the far reaches of Africa in search of the legendary giant elephants of the Angolan highlands.
Ghost Elephants is a thrilling odyssey into the unknown and an engaging eco-documentary rolled into one, but Herzog’s signature offbeat humour is always there to lighten the scientific underpinnings that ground the dreamlike story (along with a National Geographic sign-off).
Accompanying him is Steve Boyes a South African conservationist who certainly looks the part. With his turquoise bracelets jangling against a snazzy Rolex watch and a teal green safari shirt that matches his alert eyes he is the visionary leader of this ‘boys own’ journey, Herzog’s mournful narration tempering Boyes’ determined derring-do.
In this follow-up to his eco-docs Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds and Into the Inferno and the earlier Grizzly Man the director and his companions will encounter some scary beasts along the way to Angola’s magical rain forest including a black dragon-like lizard, a toxic spider carrying a multitude of babies on its back and a terrifying green snake. But the question uppermost on our minds is will they set eyes on the mysterious ghost elephants? We will find out in the film’s slightly anti-climatic denouement.
The film opens at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, where, rather like the British Museum’s giant dinosaur, the largest elephant known to mankind has been on display since soon after a Hungarian hunter shot it in 1955. Dr Boyes has spent years researching a sub-species of ‘ghost elephants’ that purportedly still roam the remote recesses of the Bié Plateau of Angola’s Central Highlands – a vast, ecologically important African watershed that locals, have apparently named ‘the Source of Life’.
The focus here is as much the preparation for the trek as the actual findings. And vital to the trip are the ‘Gurkhas’ of the region, the San bushmen of Namibia, who communicate in a clicking language and pride themselves with their skill at mimicking the fauna and the prey that surrounds them. Herzog who grew up in an isolated mountain shed has a strange infinity with these people and their frugal lifestyle. They will join up with a group of Angolan rangers for the search across the heavily wooded bush. The jeeps are soon abandoned in preference for motorbikes, and when the tracks grow too narrow they will proceed on foot often wading across rivers fully clothed. But Herzog’s eye is always on the mythical lure of the ghost elephants and his fascination is firmly with the beasts that roam our dreams rather than those caught on camera. @MeredithTaylor
SCREENING AT VIENNALE | WORTH PREMIERE VENICE 2025