Almost every film Werner Herzog makes is savage and incisive. Encounters at the End of the World is no different. Far-out and unforgettable, it is set at McMurdo Station, a settlement in Antarctica populated by professional dreamers masquerading as scientists, one of whom is a woman whose party trick is to have herself zipped up in a luggage bag...
Like much of Herzog's previous work, this film is about crazies, freak-shows and restless pioneers in search of new horizons who are tempted to try and tame wild incorrigible nature. There is much to like here: like the scene where he asks a shy but brilliant penguin expert whether, in his twenty year career of studying them, he has ever encountered insanity amongst penguins! There is a brief moment when the expert pauses to think : then follows a shot of a lone penguin separating and wandering off from the flock and heading, on its own, towards the mountains. Why? Who knows? But one thing is certain: it will die. It is these wanderers, be they penguin or human, that Herzog is attracted to.
He prefers to see Antarctica as an endless void, an inhuman space. He offers image after image whose beauty is so strange as to seem extra-terrestrial. Composer Henry Kaiser creates a sound design whose eeriness is merely amplified by the sound of underwater seals and Herzog's own idiosyncratic direction. Fabulously weird and wonderful! Essential viewing.
