Into the Abyss (IFC Films) | Under The Radar

Into the Abyss

Studio: IFC Films
Directed by Werner Herzog

Nov 18, 2011 Web Exclusive By John Everhart

Into the Abyss is subtitled "A Tale of Death, A Tale of Light," but director Werner Herzog has been steadfast in his insistence that the film isn't a condemnation of the death penalty. Instead, he says it's an examination of man's inexplicable impulse towards killing and conversely his limitless capacity for mercy. He imbues the film with a nonjudgmental ethos, largely eschewing his trademark narrations while letting the subjects, as beyond the pale as many may initially come across, tell their stories.

The retelling of a brutal triple homicide in Conroe, TX could easily be rendered as Jerry Springer level fodder, but Herzog adroitly assembles the pieces of the puzzle so as to concoct a gut-wrenching yet endlessly thought provoking landscape. It has something of a spiritual antecedent in the Krzysztof Kieślowski classic vignette A Short Film About Killing, in that it doesn't seek facile solutions, drawing parallels between individual and state perpetrated violence through discussions with disillusioned wardens, death row chaplains, doomed inmate Michael Perry facing imminent execution in eight days, and the bereft sister of one of his victims.

Herzog dedicates the film to "the families of the victims of violent crimes," never denying the grotesque horror at the heart of what's chronicled. Yet in one of the film's more memorable scenes, he essentially tells Perry that he may not like him personally, but he respects him as a human being, elliptically revealing his disdain for the death penalty.

But the film's truly transcendent moment is when Herzog speaks with the prison's death row chaplain hours before Perry's execution. The man breaks down and cries as he eerily recounts an encounter on a golf course in which he is able to spare a squirrel's life, but reveals his frustrations with his impotence in reversing the irrevocable fate of a condmned man. It's bizarrely off-kilter and moving, and utterly emblematic of Herzog's uncanny ability to coax epiphanies from the seemingly mundane. But there's nothing prosaic about this film, a superb rumination on the fine line between life and death, and the ineffable horrors and joys that lie at the crux of the human condition. (www.ifcfilms.com/films/into-the-abyss)

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