Better Go Mad in the Wild: A Haunting Documentary Echoing the Spirit of Grey Gardens

Isla ActwrightJuly 14, 2025Last Updated: July 14, 2025

‘Better Go Mad In The Wild’ Review: Miro Remo’s Crystal Globe Winner Gets Up Close And Personal With...

The shadow of the Maysles brothers looms large over the surprise winner of the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, a documentary that vividly recalls the spirit of their 1975 masterpiece Grey Gardens. That iconic film portrayed two women living in squalor in a New York mansion, revealing their ties to the extended Kennedy family. Directed by Slovakia’s Miro Remo, Better Go Mad In The Wild makes Grey Gardens — the property, not the film — seem like a luxury estate by comparison, yet similarly challenges viewers not to judge people by appearances alone.

More directly, Remo’s work appears inspired by Dušan Hanák’s Pictures of the Old World (1972), a landmark documentary banned in former Czechoslovakia until 1988. Hanák’s film exposed the harsh effects of life under Communism, a taboo subject at the time. Today, it stands as a sympathetic study of a rural generation left behind by history, people who lived provincial lives seemingly unaware of cultural shifts in the ’50s and ’60s.

Remo’s documentary sits between these two influences. Its subjects are František and Ondřej Klišík, rugged, bearded twins in their 60s who live off the grid in Šumava, the Bohemian Forest region of the Czech Republic. The brothers are unconventional in many ways — one even keeps a photo of the Dalai Lama in their kitchen — and their home, once shared with women, was split in two by a makeshift wall after the women left.

The brothers have chosen to drop out of society and time, living as a quarreling but devoted couple on their deteriorating farmhouse. Yet they are no simple hermits. Their conversations reveal surprisingly philosophical insights despite frequent drunkenness and their rugged, hands-on approach to farm life. Narrated by a wise bull named Nandy, the film reveals that the brothers, embarrassed by failing school, became autodidacts and even played active roles in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, distributing anti-regime pamphlets for the Movement For Civil Liberty.

Film’s Style and Reception

Remo reveals this backstory sparingly, which may test some viewers expecting more exposition. Instead, the film dwells on the brothers’ authentic daily lives, filled with moments both humorous and raw — from one brother wandering naked down a country road to their comical hatred of moles. But the ongoing bickering, even Nandy’s observation that “the heat of their cabin fever is becoming too much to endure,” sometimes makes the film feel labored.

The brothers are never pressured on camera, and the film prefers to showcase their eccentricity over practical details about how they sustain their lifestyle. This trade-off yields memorable scenes — like the men covered in cabbages or having their beards sucked by a cow — yet leaves a sense that a deeper, more profound exploration was missed.

Nandy muses, “Separating twins is like breaking a mirror,” a thought that highlights the intense bond between the Klišík brothers. The film might have benefitted from further examination of this fascinating relationship.