Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog looks at a triple murder case in Texas. Two young men were convicted, one serving life and the other on death row, and Herzog talks to the second of them eight days before his execution. The position is stated plainly. Herzog tells the condemned man that he opposes the death penalty, and then declines to argue that he is innocent. Nothing about the killings is softened. The subject is not guilt but the fact of a state killing a person on a scheduled date. The strongest material sits outside the case: relatives of the victims, the prisoner's father, and a former member of the execution team who eventually walked away from the job. The scene where that man explains why he stopped is the heart of the film. The difficulty is that the crime scene footage is real and hard to sit through, the interviews run long, and the film arrives nowhere. It never intended to. Who it is for: viewers interested in capital punishment and in Herzog as a documentarian. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a neutral investigation.