REVIEW: Into the Abyss (2011)

When following the nonfiction career of Werner Herzog, the biggest and most understandable mistake you can make is thinking of the films as "documentaries."  If you do, you may wonder why, in a genre meant to inform, the director keeps chiming in, often superimposing his own views, or shooting it all in such a way that raw footage feels like it's being beamed to you from another planet.  It's far better think of them as something like "first-person cinema": Herzog travels the world, from Antarctica to prehistoric caves, and records what he sees and how it makes him feel.  With films like Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World (2007), and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), his interest is not simply facts or information, but mood (otherworldy), lyricism (dark), philosophical speculation (darker), and other things that are best handled subjectively.  How well you jive with seeing the world through a Herzogian prism is up to each viewer.  Some find it offensive to his subjects, and some just find it funny, which is why he's inspired his very own line of internet parodies.  But it's an undeniably fascinating approach, smashing auteur theory and documentary ethics together.  Just as Herzog's most famous narrative films—with their obsessive location shooting and wayward stars like Klaus Kinski and Bruno S.—had a certain unscripted element, so his "documentaries" have an air of fiction, of being a constructed and fabricated work of art.  Together, they constitute one of the most unique bodies of work in modern cinema, and it can make you wish to see what other narrative filmmakers would do if they tried to branch out into the documentary vein.

So it's strange that Herzog's latest foray into nonfiction, Into the Abyss, is in many ways his most formally conventional documentary in last ten years or so—at least, shorter on lyricism and musing, and high on topicality—and it shouldn't be so surprising that the film is marred for it. Perhaps because, the closer Herzog comes to making what we think of as a documentary, the more the downsides to his approach come to the surface.

Into the Abyss finds Herzog visiting death row, detailing a decade-old case of murder and carjacking in Texas and the fallout its left behind on both the victims' families and the perpetrators.  It's about a way of life as much as it's about any particular people, and the film's power comes from its subjects.  A young man on death row talks about how he found God and has made peace with dying.  A woman falls in love with and even marries a man who's in prison with a life sentence.  A convicted father talks about how he feels like a failure, because his son is now in jail, too.  And a weary retired guard details, with a heartbreaking cracked voice, the step by step process of putting a man to death.  The grand themes under the surface—the burden of existence in an indifferent universe, the insanity of a supposedly civilized society, the brief and surprising moments of ecstasy—are familiar terrain for Herzog, and once the film dispenses with the necessary exposition and moves into the second half, it builds remarkably.

But for the first time in recent memory, Herzog's guiding hand feels as much like a detriment as an aid.  His presence from behind the camera, caught in glimpses during interviews, can feel exploitative, or even condescending.  While in Grizzly Man, Herzog found a sense of understanding in his subject, here he seems consciously to view this milieu from the outside, in his worst moments just a filmmaker looking to score powerful footage.  It's a subtle distinction—only a few degrees away from a true success like Encounters at the End of the World—but it's enough that a truly haunting film can also leave a bad taste in your mouth.

4 out of 5 stars.

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Into the Abyss is now playing on Netflix Instant.