Miro Remo’s “Better Go Mad In The Wild” (Original title: Radeji zesílet v divocine, 2025) arguably taps the spirit of twindom more cohesively, exhilaratingly, and achingly than any recent film. There’s a spirited cheekiness, a willingness to live uproariously in their secluded patch that instantly endears the sixty-something brothers, Ondřej and František, to us. The former is a persistent alcoholic, rooted in the practical, the latter a dreamer who often slips into rhyme.
Time seems to pass, yet not quite, in the Czech Šumava forests, within, they move from one day to the other. Remo arrests the tide of a thinly constructed narrative according to the very energy and pace the brothers’ silo has. A large round mirror, shifting places throughout the film, is a constant companion. As a storyteller, Remo has a great gift for locating truth, warm and puckish and crushing, in casual intimacy. Equally shimmering is nature that is the bosom of the twins.
They are also distinct in terms of temperaments and attitudes. There’s a good deal of ribbing and sparring, but an ultimate, overriding inextricability. Women have been transient in their lives. Whenever either of them had a partner, demanded privacy, and divided the house, it didn’t last very long. The brothers intimately trust each other, more reliant than anyone else ever. We witness squabbles as well as their making up soon after.
Despite a slew of differences, they share an intellectual appetite, foraging for wonder and mischief in their privately tucked-away realm. Poetry occasionally breezes through their exchanges. They have no interest in a rapidly modernized world with its barrage of online mediations, curated profiles. Choices of entertainment are sparse, almost antediluvian, but they are content with it. They know how to prise daily engagement out of the scraps they live on.
The hybrid documentary is richly attentive to the everyday moments the twins go through. Here’s a humbling reverence of the natural world, the stillness and dynamism that life is infused with. As long as one remembers to look for it, grace and beauty will be found. Remo’s gaze is tender, teeming, and deeply magnanimous. A donkey, Nandy, fills us in on spare facets of backstories, though the film is inclined to the present, snatching joy from its pockets. The brothers are indeed smart and resourceful. They have always been, Nandy asserts. But they never fared well in structures or rung-wise, through schools and so on.
“Better Go Mad In The Wild” reflects a lively permeability to the world. Remo and DP Dušan Husár vividly capture loose, floating cadences of a life led outside norms and modern-era compulsions. The twins’ sticking to their old habits, rhythms of living that almost seem outlier, feel radical. Their light-footed defiance, however, doesn’t elide the fact that they did have lives outside. They were active in the Velvet Revolution and were duly honoured for it. Their dissidence wasn’t a one-off thing; rather, they emphatically hold onto it till the present day, fervent in opposition to far-right leaders like Putin.
Their current status is a chosen retreat. Neither will have it any other way. Remo really zeroes in on the two’s voluntary isolation, never interrupting its fabric with intrusions or probable public interactions. Situated in this bubble, Remo keeps turning us to the reserves of delight the brothers continually mine. Yes, ennui does creep in every now and then. They tire each other out from time to time, exasperated with certain habits. František busies himself in cobbling together an amateur flying machine.
As much as drawn-out the film’s temporality appears, it’s also limned by a sense of impending finality, mortality abiding in the wings. For all the boisterous fun the siblings have among themselves, Remo orchestrates, at times, a darkening of mood. Theirs is such an inexorably shared existence that the suturing of one would be too immense. Remo tints “Better Go Mad In The Wild” with this quiet, inner restlessness. The tone he creates is as upbeat and languid as punctuated with dolefulness that wrings us out. It’s an absolute delight, a profoundly moving experience to watch the indelible duo be puerile and petty and nakedly raw and vulnerable with each other.
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