Fascinatingly weird – but not satisfyingly weird: Herzog’s Family Romance LLC reviewed

In the past Werner Herzog has given us a man pushing a ship up a mountain, a 16th-century conquistador going mad in Peru, Timothy Treadwell being eaten by a bear (who isn’t still recovering from that one?) and the 3-D documentary on cave paintings that ended with albino alligators, so there is never any saying what his next film will be about. Only that it’s likely to be quite weird. And Family Romance is quite weird. It’s real but fake (or vice versa) and filmed on the fly in the Japanese language even though Herzog doesn’t speak Japanese. And there’s more, so much more. It’s fascinatingly weird for sure. Even if, ultimately, it’s not satisfyingly weird.

Shot guerrilla-style in Tokyo with hand-held cameras for next to no money, and with Herzog using translators throughout, the film opens in a park during the cherry blossom season.