Family Romance, LLC

In the current moment, with our wary physical distancing and awkward artificial socializing, Family Romance LLC’s gaze into the uncanny valley absolutely chimes with the times.

It might be staged, but it has a scrappy, fly-on-the-wall feel.

Fans of Herzog — and that really should be all of you — should seek it out.

A curious little meditation on the extent to which humans will go to make connections, and on the commodification of everything up to and including love, it is a fascinating film that will never be confused with one of Herzog’s major works. But it nonetheless has moments of subtle and quintessentially Herzogian rhapsody.

A compelling curio from Werner Herzog, who investigates a strange real-life phenomenon through a fictional lens. It's worth watching, especially if you enjoy Herzog's lateral take on life, but it's hard not to wish he'd just made it as a straight documentary.

The “LLC” in the film’s title is a clue that the movie wasn’t conceived purely in a spirit of empathy, although Herzog’s humor is good-natured enough. If anything, Family Romance is just the latest iteration of a uniquely human desire to replicate the relationships we can’t control in our lives.

Conversely, a more straightforward documentary might address the bigger questions Herzog barely grazes in fictionalization. Family Romance, LLC straddles the line between the two tacts and finds no ecstatic truth there.