For thirteen summers, Timothy Treadwell lived among wild grizzly bears on Alaska's Katmai coast, and for the last five of those years he filmed almost everything: the bears grazing feet from his tent, foxes he named and fed, his own monologues to the camera about love and death and the animals he believed had accepted him. Werner Herzog builds the film from that footage, over a hundred hours of it, after Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by a bear in 2003. Herzog narrates in his own voice, skeptical where Treadwell was rapturous, and interviews the coroner, a former park ranger, Treadwell's friends and parents, and the Native Alaskan who bluntly says the bears should be feared, not loved. One scene has Herzog listening to the audio recording of the fatal attack through headphones, refusing to let the audience hear it and telling Treadwell's friend to destroy the tape. The film sits between tribute and autopsy, never settling on whether Treadwell was a naturalist or a man who mistook wild animals for something they were not.