America – the land of the free, home of the brave, and the country of seemingly endless opportunities. For about as long as the United States of America has been an entity, there have been people from all around the world that have flocked to the nation, seeing it as a safe haven in which they can find work and hopefully prosper if they put in enough effort. It’s the entire foundation behind the entire concept of the American Dream, and something that has fueled countless works across every conceivable genre. However, someone who saw straight through these broken promises was Werner Herzog, who put together one of the most brutal indictments of the belief that America is the sanctuary of success and prosperity that it has been proposed to be over the course of its history. Stroszek is a peculiar film – a weirdly-structured tragicomedy that looks at complex themes through the eyes of characters that we struggle to connect to, and filled with the kind of absurdist humour that Herzog seemed to relish in peppering throughout his films during the earlier stages of his career, when he was more playful about the subjects he explored than he is now, where his pursuit is aligned with more challenging stories. The impetus behind Stroszek is not clear from the outset, but the more time we sit with this film, the further we can begin to understand Herzog’s very strange vision, which is less about exploiting these characters as it is focused on telling a very strong story that feels like it has a genuine sense of heartfulness underpinning it, which is not always what we’d expect from a director whose incredulity towards convention has been one of his defining features. Challenging and blisteringly funny, Stroszek is one of his finest achievements, and a film ripe for re-evaluation in the modern era.

Stroszek serves primarily as a clear indictment of the idea that those who decide to take a leap of faith and relocate to the United States are immediately going to be on the road to prosperity. Too many films show that the American Dream is easily achievable, and that these people arrive and are embraced with open arms by the residents, who help welcome them and kickstart their path to prosperity. We did not need Herzog to tell us that this was not the case – anyone with even a slight semblance of logic will immediately know that this could not be further from the truth, and using a premise that is as absurd as it is darkly comical, the director crafts a bitterly caustic satire about a group of German immigrants (composed of relative strangers, since none of them are related to each other at the outset, and have only marginal connections to one another) escaping the bleak conditions of their native Berlin, and finding a home in the wide plains of Wisconsin, which promises to be a place in which they can start anew, seeking out a life of hard work that will reap them a decent living. Obviously, Herzog’s perverse sense of humour means that this film has only a few moments of actual joy, before it rapidly declines and becomes a series of mishaps and accidents that remove every bit of warmth, one after the other, until all we are left with is a bleak sense of existential dread that is only made worse by the frequently recurring motif of a dancing chicken, which is perhaps the most genius encapsulation of the American worker any director has committed to film, a mindless drone conditioned to one specific action, and where the reward is access to the resources it needs to survive. It certainly is not a film that intends to be even vaguely subtle, and instead chooses some of the more peculiar details on which it elaborates.

Herzog has been making films for well over a century, and he’s attracted some formidable names in terms of actors. However, one aspect that makes his earlier films so endearing is how he populated them with either obscure character actors, or people who had very little (or any) previous acting experience as a whole. Stroszek is one of the most notable examples, primarily because of how much it is weighted towards being a character-based story. Bruno Schleinstein (known mostly as Bruno S.) was a performance artist known to be a prodigy when it comes to musical instruments, which was his way of dealing with his own psychological struggles that kept him in a variety of mental institutions earlier in his life, and Herzog discovered him by chance, casting him in two of his films and making him one of his many muses, clearly being inspired by his unique persona, at least enough to cast him in the leading role of Bruno in this film. Eva Mattes was more of an industry veteran, having worked with a couple of other directors prior to collaborating with Herzog, including another revolutionary German auteur in the form of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who often shared the same rarefied air as Herzog when it came to provocative statements on the decline of civilisation by way of satirical dark comedies and harrowing human dramas. She’s clearly the most experienced of the actors in this film, and she is the emotional heart of the story, to the point where the film feels far more empty once she disappears from the screen. Finally, Clemens Scheitz closes out the central trio, playing the veteran of the group. Much like Bruno S., he was a musician who Herzog came about by chance and cast in one of his earlier films, with Scheitz making his acting debut at the age of 75 in The Enigma of Kasper Hauser. Choosing to go with less well-known actors gives Stroszek a much-needed sense of authenticity, which is especially important considering the message of the film.

Yet, despite its oddities, Stroszek also happens to be one of the director’s most profoundly heartfelt films. There is certainly an abundance of cynicism present here, especially since Herzog was at his peak of sardonic social satire. However, the film is also a very touching story of small-town folk, a parable about hard-working individuals that don’t aspire to anything other than the most basic level of comfort. It’s a distinctly sedate film, with very few sequences of outright hysterics for most of the duration (which makes the outrageous nature of the climax so unforgettable), and it works mostly because it doesn’t need to resort to excess to get its message across. It is an oddly tender manifesto on the realities faced by immigrants who venture off into new parts of the world in the hopes of making a future for themselves, even if it means abandoning everything they had before they chose to make the leap. Finding comedy in such scenarios is not difficult – culture clash is fertile ground for the most charming kind of humour, and it never has to feel mean-spirited (and despite never being reluctant to show his unique brand of misanthropy, Herzog never views anyone in this film as unnecessarily idiotic or small-minded, rather showcasing their broad differences), and there’s definitely not a shortage of opportunities from which the film is able to find some genuinely funny situations. However, its also a film with its emotions in the right place, and its portrayal of these wayward souls venturing into the unknown solely to rebuild their lives is absolutely astonishing, and required Herzog to construct something that has a lot more nuance than just an outrageous comedy of errors, which is what it seems to be based on a surface-level analysis. It’s a truly humane film that avoids being both flippant and overwrought, which is not something to be dismissed.

Stroszek is a film with a very distinct worldview, which Herzog carefully deconstructs through exploring the lives of these three characters who make the intrepid decision to venture into the unknown, solely to make a life for themselves in a scenario where it seems almost impossible to succeed. It’s an intimate character drama with bold sequences of incredibly funny humour that is both absurd and captivating, which is something that Herzog regularly managed to convey throughout his films, weaponizing his strange sense of humour in increasingly complex ways. Its a hilariously irreverent film that knows how to tackle the deeper issues without becoming heavy-handed, and its balance of humane drama and off-the-wall humour makes for a profoundly enticing and complex experience, as do the wealth of complex performances that carefully traverse the boundaries of humanity as a whole. There may be several moments where the viewer is entirely unsure as to what they are seeing, and it can seem outright confusing – but knowing that not everything in the story is supposed to make sense is the first step to actually embracing the film as a whole, and once we have made note of this crucial detail, the rest of the film is an absolute delight – bizarre in the way that only a solid dark comedy made by a nihilistic German auteur can be, but filled with the most unexpected heartfulness imaginable, Stroszek is a tremendously compelling film that proves that there is always space for nuance, even in the most abstract, outrageous and seemingly surreal works.