So I actually know Werner Herzog primarily from parody twitter accounts; but my takeaway has been that he’s kinda bleak? Whether or not that’s true in general, it’s certainly true in this movie.

It starts off with an expedition of Pizarro’s to find El Dorado. After encountering a seemingly impassable bit of river, he’s ready to turn around, so he sends out a scouting party, with instructions to report back in a week; if they don’t find anything, or don’t come back, he’s going to turn around.

And so we follow the scouting party, the second in command of which is a creepily intense dude named Aguirre. Then follows a mutiny, when the leader wants to turn around to get back inside of that week but Aguirre refuses to; a declared secession from Spain; the appointment of a puppet “Emperor”; and a journey onward to find El Dorado, through rough waters, cannibal villages, famine, and a constant stream of arrows and poison darts killing the scouting party one by one until finally, the only person left is a mad Aguirre, who continues to pronounce the greatness of his Empire of El Dorado and the dynasty he will found, even as his raft is full of corpses and overrun by monkeys.

It’s sort of in the vein of Apocalypse Now, only in a much more realistic way. But what it really reminds me of is an SF book whose title would be a spoiler, where the people on a space mission end up dying to chance and accident and infighting until only a last handful remain.

The creepy music — diegetic pan flute music, and a kind of just-slightly-off organ music — combines with the intense acting and bleak story to make a movie that’s unsettling and discomfiting as it drives inexorably to tragedy. It’s not a pleasant movie in any sense, but it’s very well-done.