Ghost Elephants Review: Werner Herzog searches for ghostly elephants in stunning new documentary

Ghostly elephants
Werner Herzog, Disney+

Film director Werner Herzog has always been drawn to the frontiers of human knowledge – to the places where science meets myth, where discoveries turn into obsession. c
Ghostly elephantswhich premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, follows conservationist Steve Boyce in Angola as he searches for a herd of elephants that may or may not exist. It’s both a scientific expedition and a philosophical fable that asks what it means to chase a dream that could easily remain just that.

The premise is strikingly simple. Boyce believes a group of unusually large elephants has been sighted, possibly related to the legendary Fnykvi specimen housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Named after the engineer and big game hunter Joseph Fnikwi who shot it, it is one of the largest land mammals ever to be exhibited, standing almost a meter taller than the average African elephant. The elephants may roam the remote Bi Plateau, a sparsely populated, forested region about the size of England.

For a decade, Boyce pursued this hypothesis, collecting anecdotal evidence from master San trackers, whose ability to read tracks in the ground remains one of the most sophisticated of any surviving hunter-gatherer culture. If found, these “ghost elephants” could improve biologists’ understanding of elephant genetics, gigantism and migration patterns in one of the least-studied parts of Africa.

Dukehowever, it is never content to tell a straightforward natural history. His gritty narrative, in a style that is part professorial, part skeptic and part humorist, outlines Beuys’s larger project. What begins as a search for DNA samples turns into a reflection on how science and imagination intertwine. He likens Boyce’s pursuit to Captain Ahab’s hunt for the White Whale, though here the obsession is not destructive but generative, sustained by the belief that something vast and hidden still lies beyond human sight.

The film’s scientific content is carefully woven into its narrative fabric. Viewers see Boyce and his team prepare their equipment for an expedition, negotiate access with local leaders, and conduct fieldwork in terrain that challenges both them and their tools.

The film doesn’t offer hard data—it’s not a peer-reviewed publication after all—but it captures the methodology of field science in real time: hypothesize, observe, infer, and cautiously draw conclusions. The final discovery, tentative and incomplete, rests less on spectacle than on the slow accumulation of evidence, a rhythm the film embraces with its measured pace.

Herzog also used the camera to expand the scope of the study. The cinematography recalls the polished textures of National Geographic documentaries, but always carries Herzog’s signature curiosity. Sweeping aerial photographs of the plateau convey the immensity of the landscape, while close examination of the hands of trackers reading footprints on the ground reveals a parallel science rooted in embodied knowledge.

The San people, among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, carry genetic lines that diverged from other humans 200,000 years ago. Their track record is not treated as folklore, but as a form of empirical knowledge honed over millennia—science before laboratories.

Inevitably, the search for elephants becomes a prism for larger themes. Climate change, colonialism and the aftershocks of industrial exploitation surface in Herzog’s commentary, which is never heavy-handed but persistent. The Angolan plains, once scarred by war, are now a place where conservation, local sovereignty and environmental responsibility intersect. Beuys’ quest highlights the paradox of conservation science: to study is to intervene, and the very act of seeking conservation can change what is found.

In Herzog’s hands, ghost elephants remain both a possibility and a metaphor—fascinating creatures that embody a longing for mysteries that science has yet to tame. The message is clear: research is never just about what we discover, but about the humility to not know and the persistence to ask questions at the edge of knowledge.

Davide Abateshiani is a film critic based in Rome