When Werner Herzog makes a documentary, it doesn’t merely “examine” a topic—it dissects it with the solemnity of a funeral and the curiosity of a cat poking a loaded mousetrap. And in Into the Abyss, he trades the jungles and mountains of madness for something far more terrifying: the American prison system, specifically death row in Texas, where you can get a lethal injection faster than a library card.
This is Herzog’s morbid love letter to the institutional ballet of state-sponsored death. The film focuses on the triple homicide that landed Michael Perry on death row and his co-defendant Jason Burkett with a life sentence. Perry is 28 years old when Herzog meets him, and he has a date with a needle eight days after their interview. You’d think a man on death’s calendar would carry himself like a ghost—but Perry grins like he’s about to try out for The Price is Right. And that, right there, is the worm in the apple.
Herzog, as always, brings a cool detachment that somehow radiates empathy. He’s not interested in whether Perry is innocent (spoiler: he isn’t—he admitted it). He’s interested in what it means—for us, for Perry, for the guards, for the warden, for the priest polishing his glasses as he watches the poison do its job. It’s less true crime and more an autopsy of morality. Herzog doesn’t pretend to be a dispassionate observer—he tells Perry straight up that he doesn’t believe in capital punishment. But then he lets the camera do the heavy lifting, which it does with the patience of a man watching civilization rot in real time.
There’s a reason it’s called Into the Abyss, and not something tacky like Lethal Justice: Death Row Diaries. Herzog isn’t making a Netflix docuseries. He’s pulling on the loose threads of humanity’s most ancient contradictions: why we kill, how we forgive, and whether a state can commit murder with a clean conscience and a fresh coat of bureaucratic paint.
Perry and Burkett committed a truly dumb and tragic crime—stealing a Camaro by murdering three people, including a woman and her son. The level of cruelty is staggering, but Herzog doesn’t gawk. He looks everyone in the eye—Perry, Burkett, their families, the victims’ families, the executioner, the warden—and asks questions so deceptively gentle they cut like a scalpel. Things like, “Why does God allow capital punishment?” or “Describe an encounter with a squirrel.” No, really.
That’s the genius of Herzog. He’ll throw in something like a squirrel anecdote right after discussing a woman’s murdered teenage brother, and somehow it lands. Because life, in Herzog’s world, is not a neat linear story—it’s a maze of absurdity, pain, and flashes of unfiltered grace. Like a raccoon wandering into a church during a funeral and deciding to stay.
One of the film’s most haunting characters is the former death house chaplain, who once held the ankles of convicts during executions so they wouldn’t twitch too much. After watching dozens of men die, he snapped one day while fishing. He caught a little fish, released it, and cried like a broken hymn. That’s all it took. Not a murder. Not a confession. A fish. That’s Herzog’s abyss. It doesn’t come for you with a scream. It arrives in silence, like a fax machine printing your soul.
There’s another unforgettable moment with Fred Allen, a former captain of the death house team, who oversaw 125 executions. He talks about the precision of it—the choreography of the poison ballet. And then, one day, it hit him: “I can’t do this no more.” He walked off the job, left the prison, and hasn’t looked back. You see it in his face. He’s haunted, but free. The weight he carries could sink a battleship.
This is the real soul of the film. Not Perry’s sociopathy. Not the grisly details of the crime. It’s the psychological erosion of the people who carry out these sentences. The state thinks of executions as clean transactions—justice in, bad guy out. But humans don’t work that way. You can only strap so many people to a gurney before the ghosts move in and start redecorating.
And Herzog knows this. His voice—half Bavarian wizard, half weary uncle—guides the film like Charon rowing across the Styx. But he doesn’t preach. He doesn’t scold. He just presents the evidence: a man with eight days to live, another serving life, a grieving sister who wears her murdered brother’s ashes around her neck, a father who asks for leniency for the boy who helped kill his son. It’s not a courtroom. It’s a confessional in hell.
What’s truly wild is how normal everything looks. Strip malls, trailer parks, bland interrogation rooms with bad lighting. This is the American death machine, not in some sinister gothic compound, but in everyday suburbia. You half expect to see a Chili’s in the background. That’s the horror—how mundane it all is. Bureaucracy has smothered the ritual. The state doesn’t need a guillotine. It has paperwork.
Visually, Herzog keeps things tight and quiet. No flashy editing. No reenactments with ominous violin screeches. Just talking heads, slow pans over graveyards, and the quiet hum of inevitability. It’s not flashy—it’s honest. And that’s what makes it terrifying.
Into the Abyss isn’t here to change your mind. It’s here to make you sit in a room with people you’d rather avoid and force you to listen. And somehow, by the end, you’re not thinking about Perry’s grinning face or the smirking dead-eyed cruelty of the crime. You’re thinking about the men who watched him die. You’re thinking about that fish. And you’re wondering just how many ghosts it takes before the abyss stares back.
Final Verdict:
Herzog delivers another poetic punch to the gut with Into the Abyss, a film that doesn’t yell at the system—it stares at it, long and hard, until the cracks reveal themselves. It’s haunting, compassionate, and dry as a bone. The humor, if you find it, is the kind that sneaks up on you like a punchline in a eulogy. A squirrel story. A fish in a lake. A Camaro worth three lives.
This isn’t true crime. It’s true consequence. And it proves, once again, that the scariest monster in any Herzog film isn’t nature. It’s us.
