One can only imagine Werner Herzog’s excitement at discovering the case of Timothy Treadwell, an eco-activist who spent extended periods amongst grizzly bears armed only with a video camera and a self-appointed mission to protect the creatures. Convinced that the grizzly community was preferable to the ‘people’s world’ Treadwell would not only observe the creatures but live and interact with them at point-blank range. His well-intentioned if reckless activism ultimately went horribly wrong when Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were attacked and killed by a bear. Until then, over the course of 13 summers in the Alaskan wilderness Treadwell captured imagery of undeniable impact. While the real star of Grizzly Man is this footage, its power comes only peripherally from its achievement as wildlife documentary and primarily from Herzog’s use of it to develop an increasingly complex and contradictory portrait of Treadwell himself. What emerges is a bizarre case history of the unlikely extreme one man went to in an attempt to cope with rejection.

The film short-circuits our senses and refocuses them on the invisible. What we see onscreen is so arresting, so unlikely, and so captivating, it’s surprising that what Herzog ultimately explores are things we don’t see. He is more taken with the implicit workings and rationale of nature, for instance, than with its explicit presence alone. Moreover, for all of Treadwell’s flamboyance it is the psychology and motivations behind it that the film obsesses over. The unseen haunts Grizzly Man, as epitomized by Treadwell’s offscreen death. In a key scene, one of Treadwell’s ex-girlfriends plays Herzog the audio track of the tragedy over headphones leaving us to imagine the horror it describes. It proves too much for the filmmaker who asks her to stop and then, incredibly, advocates destroying the tape that he feels will otherwise only haunt her. Would it not be at least equally appropriate to consider storage somewhere else, under appropriate safeguard where the tape could serve a scientific or archival purpose?

Whatever we make of such morbid curiosity, Treadwell’s playful defiance of the bears is an object of inexhaustible fascination. In the film Project Grizzly , Troy Hurtubise spends years in preparation and over a hundred thousand dollars developing a protective suit to allow him to observe grizzly bears at close range. Treadwell shows just as much tenacity but none of the restraint, vowing a conviction in the inherent fairness and order of nature. The wildlife footage includes items that invite anthropomorphism, eradicating the gap between the human and the animal, like an early scene of a bear standing upright scratching its back against a tree, or a later scene in which a bear repeatedly dives to the bottom of a river in search of a stray salmon. Others reveal the implacability of the natural order—shots of battles between two bears or bear cubs that have been devoured by their own parents during a period of low salmon. Throughout, Treadwell provides commentary that’s marked by an irrepressible enthusiasm.

Herzog’s documentaries, like the ones we could imagine Treadwell making from his own videos, are notable above all for their playfulness and their willingness to indulge make believe as a way to explore actuality and real world situations. Lessons of Darkness is a prototypical example; an ostensible documentary about the oil fires that raged in Kuwait after the first gulf war, it was also an apocalyptic science-fiction film as narrated by Herzog. In Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the director made ample use of re-enactments in which the protagonist himself re-plays his experiences as a prisoner of war and eventual escapee. Treadwell in turn crafts a very careful self-portrait and one that is necessarily imbued with his own occasionally endearing, occasionally grating and always revealing biases. It becomes less and less clear to what extent Treadwell has unlocked some kind of mystic connection to these animals and to what extent he is simply deluding himself. Grizzly Man includes plenty of evidence for both cases. Treadwell develops a relationship with a fox at one point, and they have moments together where his communion with a plane other than our own seems evident. At other times he seems utterly oblivious to nature, as in making an effort to counteract a sudden drought by altering the channel of a stream to facilitate the passage of Salmon for the grizzly. Such moments make for troubling evidence of either a disregard for the natural order or some belief in his immunity to it.

At one point Herzog invites comparisons between his films and Treadwell’s when he likens some of Treadwell’s antics to those of Klaus Kinski. He goes on to stress the presence of a separate autonomous director as a crucial difference in his case. Herzog is neither coy nor tricky; he is not trying to pass the fictional as documentary or vice-versa. He seems more interested in a plain collision of the two. He praises Treadwell as a meticulous filmmaker who understood the value of perfectionism and discipline, repeating a take as many as 15 times until he was convinced it was just right. There is little doubt, watching his footage, as to Treadwell’s easy alliance the camera. In this light, his continuously reiterated selflessness and willingness to die speak as much to his gifts as an actor as they do to his genuine commitment to the grizzly bears.

The full extent of this becomes apparent as we are slowly made privy to an increasing number of Treadwell’s outtakes. Treadwell’s originally intended shots are allowed to bleed, and with them his carefully staged persona bleeds too. These moments initially allow for disruptions in Treadwell’s on-camera persona, in which he will swear or get frustrated or angry. In other words, moments in which he acts perfectly human. These culminate with an obscenity-laden tirade against the National Park Service; after each successive take Treadwell alleges to have collected himself and be ready for a ‘good take’ and then simply launches into more vitriol. It is a hilarious and troubling sight and one whose self-consciousness speaks to a world of turmoil that simmered below the surface of the self-styled innocent who was more at home amongst the natural than the man-made.

There are times when Grizzly Man begins to feel less like a straight documentary and more like a film about Werner Herzog stumbling across a story and some footage about an obsessive, manic quest and letting his own obsession and mania for the protagonist get the better of him. At numerous points Herzog goes to great lengths in his commentary to disagree with Treadwell’s romantic view of the natural world, finding beauty in either silent indifference, as in the moments of dead space while Treadwell is off-camera, or in violent chaos as in the sudden drought or two bears’ confrontation over mating rights.

The distinction is an interesting one, but Herzog appears to have been almost too anxious to make it. There is an overconfidence in such moments that favors assertion over inquiry. At one point we see a close-up of a grizzly and hear Herzog describe the callous indifference he sees in its eyes. We later learn, however, that Treadwell had described the bear that would murder him as mean and intimated that it could kill him. As the film unfolds the Herzog character grows increasingly unreliable, offering repetitive narration that is out of step with his previous work. He makes a compelling case for moments of “silent beauty” in Treadwell’s footage only to speak over them, ironically denying the shots both attributes. At other times, Herzog comment at length about Treadwell’s psychology but offers nothing that isn’t already apparent from the careful arrangement of outtakes he has deployed. The filmmaker’s willingness to embrace Treadwell’s contradictions is commendable, but his urge to underline them ends up a liability.