3/5
Directed by
one of my favorite masters of all time, Werner Herzog, Into the Abyss is a
documentary which uses a crime and the impending execution of one of its
perpetrators to try and answer the question why do people and the government kill?
The movie
begins with a long dialogue between the director and a priest whose duty is to
administer last rites to the prisoners. It becomes clear during the very first
sequence that the director is intensely anti-capital punishment. Then this
moves towards the crime which was the killing of three people for a particular
car and how the case was made against the killers.
Herzog,
with his sympathetic and German accented tone, expertly interviews the killers,
one of whom was executed eight days after talking to him. There are echoes of
In Cold Blood in this but they don’t really resonate with you.
The movie
is made with a sincere intention and manages to stir you a few times. However, it lacks
any real punch. There are no great revelations and I thought that the structure
of the story telling was a bit convoluted at times as if the editor had fucked
up a bit.
There are
better documentaries and movies on this subject and two notable mentions have
to be the life of David Gale and the Thin Blue Line. This is good cinema but doesn't hold a candle to those great and life changing works of art.
For me
personally, this is Herzog’s weakest effort. But as a documentary it is above
average.
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