Werner Herzog spends eight days with Michael Perry, a death row inmate in Conroe, Texas, filmed ten days before his scheduled execution for a triple murder committed with accomplice Jason Burkett. Herzog interviews both men, along with victims' family members, a former executioner who quit after fifty procedures, and Burkett's father, also serving a life sentence in the same prison system. The crime itself, a robbery gone wrong that left three people dead over a red Camaro, gets reconstructed through police video and courtroom testimony, but the film's real interest is in what the death penalty does to everyone it touches, not just the condemned. Herzog asks his subjects plain, direct questions on camera and lets long silences sit uncut. He states early on that he opposes capital punishment, then spends the rest of the film complicating that position with the accounts of people living inside it. The result is less a case study than a portrait of a system and the ordinary people it grinds through on both sides of the crime.