Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Werner Herzog takes a film crew to the island of Guadeloupe when he hears that the volcano on the island is going to erupt. Everyone has left, except for one old man who refuses to leave.
Herzog's audacious short documentary is singular in conception — he leads a crew into an evacuated, doom-laden island to film an imminent volcanic catastrophe, confronting fate with darkly comic existential bravado. The cinematography of the eerily abandoned Basse-Terre streets, smoking volcano flanks, and wandering livestock is hauntingly beautiful and technically remarkable given the conditions. Novelty is exceptionally high: no other filmmaker would frame such a journey with this mix of deadpan nihilism and poetic self-awareness. The old man who refuses to leave provides a memorable human anchor, though 'acting' as a formal category barely applies to a documentary of this kind, keeping that score modest. The ending — the volcano famously fails to erupt catastrophically — is simultaneously anticlimactic and thematically rich, which Herzog turns into a meditation on fate and absurdity rather than a failure of narrative.