’Better Go Mad In The Wild’: Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe winner follows Czech twins living off-grid

Dir: Miro Remo. Czech Republic/Slovak Republic. 2025. 83mins.

Miro Remo’s delightfully idiosyncratic, now-bittersweet Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe-winning documentary walks the line where factual filmmaking brushes against something weirder and wilder. Better Go Mad In The Wild, an account of lives lived far away from the civilising forces of other humans, features talking animals, homegrown weed, high-strength hooch, poetry, folklore and fairytales.

A fascinating, free-spirited portrait 

In a dilapidated farmstead in the Sumava forest, on the border between the Czech Republic and Germany, live 60-year-old identical twins Frantisek (who died just after the film’s win in Karlovy Vary) and Ondrej Klisik. Both bald as eggs, with deeply ploughed wrinkles and extravagant white beards, they can be told apart because Frantisek has one fewer limb (he lost an arm in a sawmill accident), a dreadlocked beard and a ragged basket for a hat, and Ondrej tends to be the drunker of the two. The engaging playfulness of Remo’s directorial approach captures something of the untamed spirits of these two men who never fully grew up.

As a documentarian, Remo is drawn to dreamers and eccentrics on the edge of society. His previous film, 2021’s At Full Throttle (which also screened in the main competition at Karlovy Vary), followed a former miner pursuing his ambition to become a racing car driver and won various festival awards. Better Go Mad In The Wild is a loose riff on a book of the same title by Ales Palan and Jan Sibik and, unlike its central characters – two men who rarely leave their forest – the picture looks likely to travel, to further festivals and perhaps beyond.

At first glance, this account of an earthy, off-grid existence with its gnarled and bewhiskered protagonists and their al fresco bathing arrangements has a kinship with Bogancloch, Ben Rivers’ portrait of a Scottish hermit. But thanks largely to the central characters, Better Go Mad In The Wild is a more unpredictable and unexpected film, driven by an erratic punk energy, plenty of booze and the combative love between the two brothers. There is poetry here – Frantisek launches frequently into verses of his own composition – but not the contemplative, visually lyrical beauty of Rivers’ film. Rather, Remo’s approach taps the chaos and violence of the Klisik household, with its marauding chickens, judgmental cattle and an absolute arsehole of a dog named Joint. Some moments have a rambunctious, anarchic energy that recalls the early work of Emir Kusturica.

There is a sense of mischief in the way Remo captures shots, often toying with the symmetry of the two near-identical gnome-like figures as they lurch around the frame. An opening sequence reveals one of the men perched up a tree and singing; another shows them lying, head to head, next to a scale model of their farmhouse, shaded with a marijuana plant in place of a tree.

Then there is the recurring motif of a large circular mirror, at first carried through the woods in a moment that evokes the mirror scenes in Liang Zhao’s documentary Behemoth. The bickering brothers are frequently captured together in the frame, one in the foreground, one reflected in the mirror. The symbolism is clear: they are the same, but they are also opposites. Ondrej mourns the past, and the girls he loved and lost (a few moved into the farmstead over the years, but none lasted long), while Frantisek looks to the future and the skies (he has been attempting to build a flying perpetuum machine for years). 

Remo’s approach to evoking the tones and palette of life on the edge of civilisation could be described as a hybrid documentary: scenes of the men wrestling with ploughs (and each other), and going about their hard-scrabble daily routines are interspersed with surreal dramatic constructions. But in fact, ‘hybrid’ does not really do justice to the gleeful oddness of the picture: this, after all, is a film that is partially narrated by the twins’ favourite bull, Nandy. It is a fascinating, free-spirited tribute to two men whose lifelong connection to the earth is only rivalled by their bond to each other.