In 2001, Michael Perry and James Burkett, both nineteen, entered a house in a small Texas town and murdered three people, in order to steal the victims’ car. In his latest documentary, seasoned gazer into the abyss Werner Herzog interviews Perry, who was on death row at the time and was executed during the making of the documentary, and Burkett, who is serving a life sentence and is married to a woman who volunteered to work on his appeal. 

Perry and Berkett almost certainly did it, and that’s important. But nobody’s stories quite square. Neither man owns the murders, each blaming the other. Mysterious accomplices appear and disappear from their stories. DNA-smeared evidence “was planted there or something.” Herzog speaks with cops, witnesses, relatives of the victims, and the various functionaries who attend on the complex, bureaucratised ritual that is capital punishment in Texas – and almost all of them speak with a certain appalled somnolence, as if they were dissociating. There are a few moments when an interviewee, patiently drawn out, will suddenly become completely present and aware. This snap to attention always seems to coincide with an intuitive, instant and total revulsion against the taking of life.

 The art of this film – and it is considerable – is finally to suggest that intentional killing, whether it's kids looking to jack a car, or a squad of five executioners with a gurney and a drip, or the lawmakers who make such an outcome possible, can only be carried out in this deranged, half-asleep, dissociative state. And tracking this collective madness to its source is never going to be a simple matter. Abyss gives the final word to a veteran executioner who presided over 120 killings before deciding he had had enough. He is the lucid, culpable sage of the piece – the man who woke up. 

“America” (or call it “capitalism,” if you like – Herzog declines to name it) forms a discreet background to the unfolding story. Long tracking shots from car windows show McDonalds and Subway branches, enormous gas stations, billboards for charismatic churches. Real footage of the crime scene is used. For the record, I disagree with the decision to use this, but it is unarguably macabre and affecting. There is pitch-black irony in the fact that two of the three victims were killed for the swipe key to their gated community. And you can’t miss the easy familiarity with which many of the interviewees talk about firearms – as if they were cars, or brands of beer. Viewers of this film could distance themselves, if they wanted to, from the victims’ somewhat vulgar affluence (gabled McMansion; shiny Camaro), from the routine miseries of life outside the estate walls, from Texas’s famed culture of guns and Old Testament lawmaking. 

But this would be to miss an opportunity to ask ourselves how we ought to live, and why it matters that we, and others, do. I’m not sure I quite buy the “glimmer of hope” that Herzog finds in the teeming tenacity of life, everywhere visible in the instinct to survive and reproduce. More compelling was the director’s answer, in a Q&A following the preview screening, when asked if making this film had changed his life. Emphatically not, he said – “but I would not like to have missed out on making it.” The same can be said for seeing it.