'Happy People: A Year in the Taiga' Movie Review: 300 People, One River, And Werner Herzog's Quietest Wilderness Film

There is a moment in this film where a man explains, casually, that minus thirty-three degrees Celsius is "mild" weather. He's not joking. He's halfway through making a pair of skis from a tree he chose by tapping it with his knuckles. The forest around him is dead silent. And you sit there thinking about your last argument with a barista.

That's the trick of Happy People: A Year in the Taiga. It doesn't have a plot. It barely has a story. What it has is a man, a year, and a kind of self-sufficiency the modern viewer has genuinely no frame of reference for. Werner Herzog narrates it like it's the most fascinating thing he's ever seen, which, honestly, he might mean.

Why You Should Actually Watch This

The pitch is deceptively simple. The village of Bakhta sits on the Yenisei River, about 1,000 kilometres downriver from Krasnoyarsk in the Siberian taiga. Around 300 people live there. No telephone. No running water. No medical aid. You get there by helicopter or boat, and that's it. The film follows one year in the lives of the trappers who hunt sable and fish through all four seasons.

If that sounds like a National Geographic special, it isn't. It plays slower. It lingers longer. It cares more about how a thing gets made than about why anyone should care that it's getting made. There's a long sequence about a guy carving a canoe out of a single tree, and the film just sits with him. No score swelling, no time-lapse cheating. A man, a tree, a tool. By the time the canoe is done you feel like you helped.

The Real Star Is The Sable Trap (Sort Of)

The most striking thing about Happy People is how the film treats process as performance. There's no breakout actor here, because nobody is acting. But there are people you remember.

Gennady Soloviev is one of them, the elder woodsman who has lived in the area longer than anyone and trained most of the younger trappers. He's the kind of person who explains a trap mechanism without looking up from the trap. Then there's Mikhail Tarkovsky, who is on screen as a trapper, but who, off-screen, is a published Russian writer and a documentary filmmaker in his own right. He's also, almost incidentally, the nephew of Andrei Tarkovsky. More on that shortly.

The film's other quiet star is the dog. Specifically the laika hunting dogs. There's a section where one of the trappers talks about his dogs the way most people talk about their best friends, and it might be the warmest five minutes in the whole film. You will, with absolutely no warning, get a little emotional about a Siberian working dog.

The Tarkovsky Connection Nobody Mentions

This is the trivia nobody tells you up front. Mikhail Tarkovsky, the trapper-writer in the film, is the nephew of Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the most revered filmmakers in cinema history. Mikhail moved to the Yenisei in 1981 after studying biology and geography in Moscow, and he has lived in Bakhta since the 1980s, working as a professional hunter while also writing fiction.

Here's the part that gets you. Andrei Tarkovsky himself spent time in the Siberian taiga as a young man, on a geological survey crew along the Kureyka River near Turukhansk, before enrolling in film school. He later wrote that it remained the best memory of his life and that the experience shaped him into a filmmaker. So when you watch Mikhail building traps in Bakhta, you're watching a Tarkovsky living out a version of the same wilderness that turned his uncle into a director. That's not in the film. It doesn't need to be.

How Herzog Actually Made This Film

This is the behind-the-scenes detail that reframes everything. Herzog did not shoot Happy People. The original footage is a four-part Russian television mini-series from 2007, directed by Dmitry Vasyukov, who spent a year in Bakhta living and filming alongside the trappers. Herzog watched it, was floored by it, and edited the four hours of Russian TV down to a 94-minute English-narrated feature. He wrote the narration himself. He never went to Bakhta.

If that sounds like a creative cheat, the film does not feel like one. The Herzog-isms are all there: the slightly amused gravity, the over-enunciated wonder, those deadpan asides about modern life that only he can land. His voice does about forty percent of the emotional work. The other sixty percent is Vasyukov's patient, unglamorous footage, which would hold up without narration but is a better film with it.

What Doesn't Quite Work

This is not the most innovative documentary Herzog has put his name on. If you came expecting Grizzly Man or Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it's a quieter, less philosophical sit. Some critics have argued the film romanticises the trappers. They have a point. The voiceover treats Bakhta's freedom from "bureaucracy" with maybe a little too much rapture, and the film glides past the harder edges of taiga life: the isolation, the alcoholism, the political reality of living in a place the state has functionally abandoned.

There is also the issue of the trapping itself. Animals are killed on screen. Not in a gratuitous way, but in a real way, and viewers who can't handle hunting footage should know that going in. The film does not soften it.

What To Watch For

Three things, specifically. The canoe-building sequence, where the camera basically becomes an apprentice. The spring thaw, when the Yenisei breaks up and the ice moves north in slabs the size of houses. And anything involving the dogs. Watch the trappers' faces when they talk about them. That's where the title makes sense. They are, weirdly, happy.

The Verdict

It's not Herzog's most ambitious documentary, and it isn't trying to be. It's a year in a place most of us will never see, made by people who actually live there, edited by a German director who knew exactly which ninety-four minutes to keep. Watch it on a Sunday afternoon. Watch it after a hard week at a desk job. Then look at your phone for a while and think about it.