Grade: A-

Uninspired by last week’s new releases, I decided to check out a film I missed last year, Werner Herzog’s “Into the Abyss.” After watching this moving documentary, I’m glad I refrained from devoting two hours of my life to “Men in Black III.” As eager as I am to watch Josh Brolin play a young Tommy Lee Jones, I’m prepared to wait until the clips are posted on YouTube.

“Into the Abyss” explores the aftermath of a triple homicide that occurred in Conroe, Texas, in 2001. Michael Perry and Jason Burkett were convicted of the crimes, with Perry receiving a death sentence, while Burkett received life in prison. While Herzog makes clear that he is opposed to capital punishment, “Into the Abyss” is not an “anti-capital punishment film”, per se. Nor does it examine, as so many documentaries already have, Texas’s long and sordid history of capital punishment. One senses that, for Herzog, the issue isn’t where the murders and subsequent execution occurred. What matters—and matters exclusively—is the fact that they occurred at all. Uninterested in easy moralizing and grand political statements, Herzog remains focused on what has always been his privileged subject matter—humanity, in all its sublime, terrifying and ridiculous manifestations.

Treating the tragedy in Conroe as if it were a kind of bomb that went off, Herzog measures the emotional circumference of the blast. With each interview, we see the repercussions of violence radiating outward, shattering everything in their path. “Shattering,” however, is slightly too strong a word. To the extent that “Into the Abyss” can be called an “inspirational” film (and it can), what inspires is the sight of human beings bearing enormous tragedy with a genuine dignity. If you’re having a difficult time in your life, watching “Into the Abyss” is a good way to put things into perspective. There are individuals in the film who tell stories of such extraordinary personal misfortune you’d be tempted to think I made them up. I won’t bother relating the details; you need to hear these people tell their stories themselves to appreciate the utter shittiness of the respective hands life dealt them. But they carry on nonetheless, as if to demonstrate that the only thing exceeding human frailty is human strength.

With films like “Grizzly Man,” “Encounters at the End of the World” and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” Werner Herzog has established himself as one of the world’s foremost documentary filmmakers. “Into the Abyss” marks a departure from the style of those films. Most notably, Herzog refrains from using voice-over narration as a form of philosophical commentary. And while I have always been a fan of his offbeat style of interviewing (“Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?” is a question I ask myself on a regular basis), he wisely curbs this tendency, asking direct, tactful questions that elicit powerful responses from his subjects. It’s a modest approach, and it works wonders, resulting in a film that ranks among Herzog’s best.