Grizzly Man is one of the most fascinating, and weirdest, documentaries ever made. It makes me realize that Errol Morris, for all his brilliance, often lets you off the hook by telegraphing exactly when to laugh and what to feel. Instead of Morris, we're in the hands of Werner Herzog, he of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, who is certainly one of the weirdest directors in the world and probably one of the least sentimental. If Grizzly Man were a mockumentary, or if it ended happily, we'd be laughing all the way through. As it stands, our usual responses don't work: we're seeing something absurd and cosmically hilarious, but also tragic and terrifying. Like Tarnation, this movie leaves you feeling riveted and uneasy all the way through: it's draining.

It's about Timothy Treadwell, a likeable goofball who spent thirteen summers camping out in Alaska within touching distance of grizzly bears, lectured on grizzlies to grade school kids and David Letterman, obviously prefered the company of bears to humans, and was finally killed and eaten (along with his girlfriend) by a bear that he'd videotaped earlier that day. He took almost one hundred hours of video footage in the wilderness, and most of Grizzly Man consists of Treadwell's amazing video diary, including footage that he shot only a few hours before his death. The camera was running when he was killed. The lens cap was still on, but the deaths of Treadwell and his girlfriend were caught on audio. (We don't hear the audio track, although Herzog, wearing headphones, does.) There are times when the whole thing feels like a joke, or a like Christopher Guest movie: Herzog's narration sometimes verges on self-parody, as do some of the interviewees. But it's all unspeakably scary and sad.

Anyway, it's hard to describe. Only a few blog readers will know what I'm talking about here, but if you can imagine a version of Project Grizzly in which Troy Hurtubise was killed and eaten at the end (rather than making yearly appearances at Harvard), you'll have a sense of what Grizzly Man is like.