Werner Herzog, the patron saint of staring into the abyss until it cries uncle, once dragged a steamboat over a mountain in the Amazon and filmed it just to prove life is pain and art is better when everyone’s miserable. So it only makes sense that in 2016, he turned his camera toward something truly unnatural and terrifying: the internet. The title Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World sounds like a cyberpunk opera performed by Gregorian monks with Wi-Fi, but the result is far more tragic—it’s a meandering TED Talk delivered by your nihilist uncle after discovering Reddit.
Herzog begins his digital safari at the UCLA birthplace of the internet, staring at a nondescript gray box like it’s the Ark of the Covenant. A technician lovingly caresses it, as if waiting for the ghost of Alan Turing to whisper a prophecy. This is the first node of ARPANET, where the digital floodgates opened and, decades later, gave us TikTok dances, Flat Earth memes, and guys named Kyle screaming at fast food employees.
The problem isn’t that Herzog doesn’t understand the internet—it’s that he understands it too much, but from the angle of a medieval philosopher with a hangover. He interviews robotics professors, AI engineers, reclusive physicists, digital detox cults, and people who claim to be allergic to Wi-Fi. At no point does he seem to be talking to anyone who’s ever posted on Craigslist, been banned from Facebook for threatening Mark Zuckerberg with a cartoon pitchfork, or spent 14 hours arguing about the Snyder Cut.
Instead, he floats from segment to segment like a confused falcon stuck in a server room. One minute we’re listening to Elon Musk-lite engineers rave about colonizing Mars via broadband, the next we’re watching monks build a robot to pray better. Herzog’s voice—still thick with Bavarian doom—says things like, “Does the internet dream of itself?” And you can’t tell if he’s trolling or actually thinks the Cloud is sentient and plotting against us like HAL 9000 with ADHD.
The film’s structure is loosely based around ten chapters, but don’t expect narrative cohesion. This is not The Wire for nerds. This is Herzog rolling a ball of yarn labeled “technology” through a hallway of awkward geniuses, digital prophets, and traumatized victims of online hate mobs. It’s less Reveries and more Reverent Confusion. Every time the film approaches something juicy—like the family whose daughter’s car crash photos were shared online as meme fodder—it quickly retreats back to Herzog musing about existential dread like your therapist with a God complex.
And yet, buried in this digital haystack is something… odd. Herzog is clearly horrified by the internet. But it’s not fear in the traditional sense. He doesn’t think Skynet is coming. He doesn’t think robots will kill us in our sleep. He just seems vaguely disgusted that we used a technology once designed to survive nuclear war to create Buzzfeed listicles and porn subreddits dedicated to cartoon ducks.
There’s one segment where a soccer-playing robot misses a penalty kick. Herzog, voice laced with apocalyptic sadness, says: “I see in this robot the loneliness of existence.” My guy—it’s a Roomba with cleats. Calm down.
And the Wi-Fi allergy people. Oh, the Wi-Fi allergy people. He visits a group of them living off-grid in West Virginia, in a no-signal zone that functions like a halfway house for people convinced cell towers are frying their brains like microwaved Pop-Tarts. Herzog, bless him, doesn’t mock them. He whispers his questions like he’s interviewing a ghost with a traumatic past. But c’mon—these are folks hiding from Twitter like it’s radiation from Chernobyl. You want dark humor? It’s right there, Werner. Serve it up.
But no, the film takes these moments too seriously and the serious moments too dreamily. You’re never quite sure if you’re watching a documentary, a eulogy, or a warning written in code by a sentient fax machine. And that’s the paradox of Lo and Behold: it wants to be profound, but ends up a patchwork of YouTube deep dives stitched together with Herzog’s brooding commentary. Like a noir detective trying to solve the mystery of broadband.
Also, no millennials. No TikTokers. No Twitch streamers. Not even a bored teenager rage-quitting Fortnite. This isn’t a film about our internet. It’s Herzog’s internet—a haunted, sterile wasteland full of math geniuses, philosophical physicists, and dusty server rooms that smell like existential dread. It’s a film about technology made by a man who writes letters by candlelight and thinks emojis are the devil’s hieroglyphics.
In the end, Lo and Behold is like a digital fever dream narrated by someone who never got over the death of telegrams. It wants to show you the future, but keeps stopping to ask if we deserve one. Herzog never really answers his own questions, because he’s not interested in answers. He’s interested in staring at the glowing rot of humanity’s digital brain and whispering, “Lo… what the hell have you done?”
Final Verdict:
Lo and Behold is less a documentary and more a rambling German monologue conducted in the ruins of the Information Age. If you’ve ever wanted to hear a man with the voice of Death himself describe Google as “a cathedral of human knowledge,” this is for you. If you wanted insight into how the internet actually feels to use, you’d get more honesty from reading Reddit comments at 2 a.m. in your underwear.
The film ultimately fails to connect to the world it tries to explore, like a modem stuck on dial-up in a world that’s already moved to 5G. It’s gorgeous, yes. Thoughtful, occasionally. But relevant? Only if you think Wi-Fi has a soul. And if that’s the case, maybe Herzog’s onto something after all. Just don’t let him near ChatGPT. He’ll probably accuse it of dreaming in binary and planning the fall of mankind.
