‘Ghost Elephants’ review: Werner Herzog tracks the legendary beast through the Angolan highlands

Dir: Werner Herzog. USA. 2025. 99mins

Werner Herzog documentaries are always as much about the director as his subject. This spirited bushwhack through the Angolan highlands in search of a legendary (or possibly mythical) giant elephant is no exception. All the trademark features are here – a visionary dreamer with a crazy mission, Werner’s Germanic narration with its mix of romantic hyperbole and dark pessimism, the unplanned digressions such as the arrival of a poisonous spider, its back teeming with equally poisonous babies, that sends the director into paroxysms of doom-laden glee. Most importantly, Ghost Elephants is an engaging story well-told, one that takes us to a far-flung part of the world, exposes its raw beauty, and spends time with its curious human inhabitants.

As much about the preparation as the trek

Premiering out of competition in Venice, this could be Herzog’s best theatrical documentary prospect in a while. Though it lacks a really effective final kicker, the journey is absorbing enough for that not to matter too much. Ghost Elephants not only looks great, it’s accompanied by a haunting soundtrack courtesy of Dutch composer Ernst Reijseger, consisting largely of arrangements of traditional songs by a Sardinian male voice choir that the musician has been working with for decades. The African-Sardinian pairing may be random, but it’s weirdly effective.

Ghost Elephant – which bears a ‘National Geographic Documentary Films’ imprimatur – will sit on the nature doc shelf but, as with his Antarctica outing Encounters at the End of the World or his volcano saga Into the Inferno, it’s the people who travel to extreme places, and their reasons for doing so, that fascinate the director. He has made three films that feature vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer – the most recent of which, Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, was even co-directed by the British scientist. You can imagine Herzog enjoying just the same run of luck with Dr Steve Boyes, the personable subject of Ghost Elephants. With his mix of boyish enthusiasm and existential self-doubt, the South African conservationist is the ideal Werner subject – or, rather, accomplice. He is filmed musing that “I have spent my life living in a dream that I’ve never had”; a line so perfect that it could have been scripted.

The film opens at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, where Boyes is filmed looking in awe at an elephant that has been on display since soon after a Hungarian hunter shot it in 1955. It is the largest elephant ever recorded, and the dedicated South African naturalist has spent years searching for evidence that it belongs to a sub-species of huge, mysterious ‘ghost elephants’ that still roam the more impenetrable corners of the Bié Plateau in Angola’s Central Highlands – a vast, ecologically vital African watershed that locals, we are told, call ‘the Source of Life’.

Like any self-respecting expeditionary documentary, Ghost Elephants is as much about the preparation as the trek. Though the goal is Angola, the most talented elephant trackers, we learn, are the San bushmen of Namibia, and Herzog embeds himself and Boyes with them in the film’s long first section. He allows himself to become distracted by their nimble grace and primordial connection with the natural world – though in a new, self-mocking note for the director, he also cautions himself about his tendency to ‘romanticise’ a simple life spent, as he puts it, “surrounded by chickens”.

The San are not only gifted trackers, they are also incredible physical mimics of the animals they hunt. As we watch them transform themselves into elephants, or see a hunter become, for a few precious seconds, a staggering, dying antelope, we begin to understand where Herzog is going with his questions to Boyes about how much finding the ghost elephants actually matters.

In the second part of the documentary, where the bushmen join a group of Angolan rangers and the search begins in earnest, there’s a sense that, for all the ravishing footage of misty highland landscapes, the director is keeping an ironic distance from a quest that a more conventional nature narrator would edit for maximum thrill-of-the-chase suspense. It’s our inner elephants that really fascinate him; the ones that become part of our dreams, that may disappoint if ever actually caught on camera.