This Ghost Elephants documentary review covers one of the most arresting nature films you’ll see this year. Werner Herzog’s latest takes us into an entirely unfamiliar world, one where human language isn’t phonetic but rather grunts, clicks, and breaths, and where a massive “water tower” land formation creates wetlands and heavy rains in the midst of Africa’s Namibian desert.
This is where the ghost elephants live.
They are believed to be descendants of Henry, the world’s largest known mammal at 13 feet, mummified, partly reconstructed, and displayed at the Smithsonian Institution for the past seventy years. Herzog follows Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, alongside Bushman tracker Xui Dawid, anthropologist Kellen Costa, and a team of locals, as they set out to find Henry’s living descendants. A DNA sample, they hope, will confirm the connection. If it does, these elephants would be enormous, well beyond the standard elephant height of ten feet.
The problem: they are rarely sighted.
The journey is gruelling, a roadless thousand miles from Angola, ending in a thirty-mile walk to a 4,000-foot plateau. Herzog, ever the philosopher, ponders the “dream” of the ghost elephants. Do they even exist? Xui, described as the last known master tracker, reads the trees and sand like a newspaper, and his presence gives the team and the viewer quiet confidence.
About the Documentary Ghost Elephants is directed by Werner Herzog and produced by National Geographic. It premieres March 7 on National Geographic and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu. Runtime is approximately 90 minutes.
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What emerges is an absolutely masterful experience, visually stunning and rich with precious moments of Bushmen chanting and vast living landscapes. We also learn something quietly staggering: all of humanity is descended from the Kalahari Sands Bushmen, who survived the Ice Age, hunted with poison arrows, and walked out into the rest of the world. We are their descendants.
Herzog’s labour of love is an experience to be savoured.
One warning: the film contains archival footage from an Italian documentary showing elephants being killed for sport. You can fast forward through it.
Ghost Elephants premieres March 7 on National Geographic and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
