Filmmaker Werner Herzog does a documentary about Michael James Perry. He's on death row in Livingston, Texas scheduled to be executed in 8 days. He was convicted along with his friend Jason Burkett for a triple homicide. They killed a housewife in her home to steal a car and then killed two young people to get passcode for the community gate. This is not really a whodunit unless you believe Burkett or even Perry. It's not impossible to believe them and there are certainly people willing to do that. This is really about the whole society in general. It is about the victims. It is about the daughter who lost her family. It is about Burkett's father who watches his various family members get incarcerated along with him. It is about the friend and Herzog who is more interested in him learning to read as an adult. It is about the executioner who had to quit. This is quite a tapestry of Texan life.

What struck me about Into The Abyss was that it wasn't so much a true-crime documentary, but more a thoughtful exploration into one crime and its subsequent consequences. I know that Herzog documentaries aren't always the most objective, but while I was watching Into The Abyss, I didn't get the impression that there was a particular theme or message being pushed at me. At some point, Herzog mentions that he is averse to capital punishment, but this opinion does not dominate the documentary.One interesting thing that Herzog did was that he presented the interviews in a particular way. One of the very first interviews is of death row inmate, Matthew Perry, and Herzog then delves deeper by questioning law enforcement, relatives of the deceased, friends of the perpetrators, etc. We immediately learn that Perry is sentenced to die in 8 days, though it is not until the very end that he has died via lethal injection as scheduled. This creates an effective yet not jarring or overly distracting shock for the audience. Someone that they had just witnessed living and talking has died. It is strange and sometimes uncomfortable to process, and I think Herzog had this in mind when he finally put together the film.As a documentary, Into The Abyss was intriguing, engaging, and emotional. It was full of very human interviews; people wept and sighed and stuttered, adding to the realism and the rawness overall. This is not what I would call a "beautiful" film, but it is a film that is thoughtful and well-made. I didn't enjoy this as much as Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but then again, that can be attributed to the difficult subject matter of Into The Abyss. However, after finishing the movie, I wasn't left with any deeper insight or revelations than when I started. This film is undoubtedly well-made and carefully shot, but not as introspective as some of Herzog's other documentary films. I felt the movie skimmed the surface of what Herzog could have potentially addressed: the criminal justice system, capital punishment, the nature of grief and death, etc, yet in the end Into The Abyss seemed kind of bare. I wish Herzog could have just explored the topic(s) touched in Into The Abyss a bit more; nevertheless, I am looking forward to more of his works.

When I sat to watch this I knew it was a Herzog film but still in my mind I thought it would have an agenda – even more so when he makes it clear near the very start of the film that he is against the death penalty. Given the subject matter, the back stories and the level of access he has, this could so easily have been a film that lays out this agenda very clearly and with strength, so it is to his credit that this isn't what he does. Truth be told, it may have been a "better" film if he had done this because as it is one of the weaknesses of the film is that there isn't really an agenda or point to be made but rather we wander through the people and their stories with the double murder and the impending execution as the point from which we start.I can understand why this approach will leave some viewers cold, because it does appear to be an agenda film and generally one does like to be led to something rather than just presented with everything, but with Herzog it is perhaps not too much of a surprise. What we get instead is hard to describe but it is very much about us settling down into humanity and seeing the hurt, the loss and the pointlessness of all of it – from the murder (over a rather tacky car) through to the eventual actions by the State. There is pain, regret, bad choices, bad circumstances, stupidity and waste across the whole film and it is hard to really get to grips with beyond just experiencing it and taking some of it with you. I guess the title is apt, because the only thing the film seems to do is take us into this abyss and then leave us there. In this journey it is engaging and depressing in equal measure, but the lack of structure and aim (even delivered via the edit) is very much a weakness that even that those that love the film will concede.It doesn't make it bad though, because it isn't – it is engaging throughout. However it is weaker than it could have been. Herzog doesn't seem to push his subjects and gives them too much room, while tragic there is a lot of blame and deliberate decisions on display here and it must be said that he sits back off this in a way that surprised me. At times he has the magic touch/luck to get nuggets from people with this approach (the squirrel story at the start) but at other times it seems too soft, too unfocused, too much about the "experience" rather than the meat.So in this regard it is weak in certain, important areas but yet mostly it still just about works. Less of a documentary, more of a stroll through misery, he just about manages to avoid it being naval gazing (I read some reviews saying it was wallowing for the sake of it) but for sure he gets close some times. The pain, the pointlessness and the waste is real though and he lets this simply become apparent to us by letting people talk; this much engages and depresses and I guess this is ultimately the goal of the film from Herzog's point of view.

I just watched a documentary by the masterful filmmaker, Werner Herzog, Into the Abyss. He does what a great filmmaker can do, change your perception of an issue. The film is not the most pleasant of subjects, a triple slaying of three people, and then the ensuing death by lethal injection of one of the two teenage murderers in the state of Texas. There are many reasons why I was so affected by the film, and I watch a lot of documentaries, the first being that I related so much to the two teenagers who did the killings.Herzog, the filmmaker, doesn't focus on the trial, rather, he focuses more on the anatomy of the crime, and the way in which each of the characters were affected. He has an amazing sense of place, just as he did with Grizzly Man,he puts the viewer directly into the film by establishing a feel of the surroundings, patiently filming poignant parts of the town where these people where from , so that one can really understand that this could be your neighborhood, your friend, your acquaintance, or even members of your own family. His interview style is unwavering and fearless, in fact, each of these people you felt trusted him completely, from the daughter whose mother was killed, to the father of one of the killers. Even the sheriff who investigated the crime ten years before, had none of the resistance that law enforcement can sometimes have in an interview like this. I'm remiss in not mentioning the interview of the Captain of the team that carried out so many of the executions in Texas, sometimes two a week, until he resigned after the execution of Karla Rae Tucker, the first woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War. His testimony was powerful, coming from this huge man with the Texas accent, who was changed by that particular execution, and changed his view on capitol punishment, and this after doing it for ten years. He claims the execution of Karla Rae Tucker caused him an introduction to his real self, and as he says near the end of the film, "No one has the right to take another person's life, no matter the circumstances."In Werner Herzog's film, he doesn't excuse the crimes that they committed, but he does cause the viewer to look and think about the great mountain of destruction that was built even before these two teen killers were born. The one tried to take care of the other one, by taking him in to live with him in a camper. Before that, the boy was living in the trunk of an abandoned car. I think that was what was impressive about the film, that Werner Herzog gave something to this whole situation, and not just to the young man who would die eight days later, but to everyone involved. He gave the other boy's father a chance to seek some kind of redemption, and fight for his son's life, even when he had taken lives himself.The film made me think of the fragile circumstances that exist for so many kids growing up between a life in prison or on death row. Sometimes, it requires the risky intervention on the part of someone who is actually living Christian principles instead of talking about them.Herzog is a patient filmmaker. Even the long shots that he chooses too edit into the film are packed full of sub-text. One has to stay open and un-affected by the usual techniques of filmmaking, depending on quick edits and short sound bites. Herzog is a master, and if one is willing to trust him completely, the pay-off is extraordinary.