There are bad movies, and then there are films like Salt and Fire—a cinematic enigma so baffling it feels like Werner Herzog accidentally dropped a stack of philosophy textbooks into a blender, added some sand, three blindfolded actors, and pressed “purée.” It’s an eco-thriller without thrills, a hostage drama where everyone is too polite to actually be upset, and a love letter to volcanoes that’s emotionally about as moving as a geology lecture delivered by a substitute teacher who’s slowly giving up on life.
Let me be clear: I admire Werner Herzog. The man’s brain is wired like a Soviet control panel. He gave us Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and Grizzly Man—all celebrations of madness, nature, and man’s existential dance with the void. But Salt and Fire? This is like if Herzog tried to make a Lifetime Original Movie while suffering a migraine and shooting in an abandoned salt flat with nothing but Google Translate and the ghost of Klaus Kinski whispering incoherently in his ear.
And somehow, he convinced Michael Shannon to show up. God bless Shannon. He’s doing his best. But it’s like watching a falcon try to recite poetry while drowning in corn syrup.
🧂 The Plot: You Thought You Knew What a Movie Was
Here’s the setup: A UN team (led by Veronica Ferres, who acts like she’s been hypnotized by a PowerPoint) flies to Bolivia to investigate an ecological disaster caused by corporate malfeasance. They’re kidnapped—yes, kidnapped—by a CEO played by Michael Shannon in a performance so dry you could light it on fire and it still wouldn’t smoke.
But here’s the twist: it’s not really a kidnapping. It’s more of a forced yoga retreat with vague metaphysical implications. Shannon doesn’t threaten them. He doesn’t hurt them. He mostly just makes them sit around and talk about metaphors, science, and volcanoes while squinting at salt.
Then—because even boredom deserves plot progression—Ferres’s character is left alone with two blind boys in the middle of a dried salt lake. Is it a test? A punishment? A symbolic rebirth? Nobody knows. Least of all the blind boys, who appear to have been borrowed from a failed audition for a “Sad Children of the Apocalypse” calendar shoot.
🔥 Michael Shannon: Corporate Villain or Sedated Philosophy Professor?
Shannon plays Matt Riley, the enigmatic CEO responsible for the catastrophe. Instead of being a menacing corporate overlord, he spends most of the film casually quoting Borges, referencing scientific journals, and speaking like a man who’s just been gently concussed by a thesaurus.
He wears aviators. He delivers monologues about supervolcanoes. He waxes poetic about blindness, guilt, and ecological despair. But he never actually does anything villainous, unless you count forcing people to listen to him talk for more than 90 seconds.
He’s the kind of antagonist who might apologize for inconveniencing you with his hostage-taking and then recommend a book on quantum ethics over quinoa.
🧂 Veronica Ferres: Staring Contest Champion 2016
As the lead UN scientist, Ferres delivers a performance that lands somewhere between confused mannequin and exasperated IKEA customer. She spends most of her screen time blinking slowly, asking questions that Shannon doesn’t answer, and occasionally walking in circles as if trying to find the exit from this very film.
She’s supposed to be brilliant, determined, and morally driven. Instead, she comes across as someone who got tricked into being in a student film adaptation of a Wikipedia article on tectonic instability.
Her emotional range spans from mild annoyance to slightly more pronounced mild annoyance. By the end, you wonder if she even knows she’s in a movie or just thinks she wandered into a desert-themed art installation and can’t find the bathroom.
🌋 Eco-Thriller Without the Thriller, or the Eco
This is a movie that wants desperately to say something meaningful about the environment, about industrial devastation, about humanity’s arrogant manipulation of nature. But it never builds a coherent argument. It just hurls disconnected lines of dialogue at the audience like confetti made of recycled pamphlets.
One minute, we’re discussing tectonic plates. The next, Shannon is explaining how time is a “liquid concept,” and Ferres is staring at the horizon like it just insulted her mother. Herzog inserts stock footage of lava flows, birds in flight, and dissolving glaciers, hoping it’ll pass as visual poetry. But it feels more like he left his National Geographic screensaver running too long.
This is a movie that confuses whispering about global catastrophe with having an actual plot. There’s no urgency, no conflict, no stakes—just salt. Endless salt. I have seen more tension in a cooking show.
👶 The Blind Boys: Herzog’s Attempt at Symbolism or Just a Prank?
Let’s talk about the blind boys. Herzog loves children in his films—usually the kind that stare through your soul while holding a turtle or quoting Nietzsche. In Salt and Fire, Ferres is left with two blind children in the middle of the desert, presumably to teach her some profound truth about life, suffering, or ethical responsibility.
Instead, she makes a lot of sand angels, cooks weird meals, and tries to name a mountain “inspired by the shape of their buttocks.” Again, not a joke. That line is in the movie. It’s meant to be transcendent. It lands like a failed dad joke written in Sanskrit.
What should have been a moment of emotional reckoning becomes a salt-crusted episode of Naked and Afraid: Existential Edition.
🎬 Final Thoughts: The Emperor Has No Volcano
Salt and Fire wants to be deep. It wants to provoke, to challenge, to awaken your dormant ecological guilt. But it doesn’t. It bores you into a state of such stupor you begin to doubt whether you even know what cinema is anymore. You wonder if maybe you dreamed movies. That Jaws, No Country for Old Men, Paddington 2—maybe they never existed. Maybe it’s always been salt and fire, and nothing else.
Herzog has made weird films before. Even Dwarfs Started Small is pure chaos. The Wild Blue Yonder is intergalactic madness with underwater clarinet solos. But those films had purpose. Salt and Fire feels like he left the camera on during a fever dream and decided not to cut anything because, hey, lava is metaphorical.
If this was Herzog’s warning about ecological collapse, then it’s the cinematic equivalent of yelling “Recycling is good!” into a canyon and hoping someone downstream hears it in 2043.
Rating: 1 out of 5 sodium-rich hallucinations
Because even the volcano seems bored.
