Don't be fooled by the lack of suicidal pe🐻nguins and bear-loving oddballs in Werner Herzog’s documentary about Deat🔯h Row.

His tenacious curiosity, eye for absurd-yet-telling details and passionate humanism are upfront here, braiding a study of capital puni𝄹shment in Texas with an incisive, c꧙ompassionate portrait of life in death’s shadow.

Herzog makes his ethical stance clear (“humans should not be executed”) and rigorously details a triple homicide th𒐪at spiralled fr♛om a car theft. Yet he’s not mounting a defence for the condemned.

His purpose is existential: a beady probe into the lives of those affected by the pending execution of 28-year-old Mic💝hael Perry and the murders he’s charged with. Off-screen, Herzog’s canny queries and patient ear disarm interviewees.

The oddly perky Perry and his partner in crime are the least interesting – the glass between the felons and Herzog exacerbates a sense of distance – yet other subjects♌ unload to devastating effect.

A grief-lashed woman’s account of her multiple losses and an ex-prison worker&rsq🍸uo;s death row dispatches offer articulate expressions of death’s wallop.

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams ’ stereoscopic wow and Grizzly Man ’s mounting madnesses are missing, but Herzog’s eye stays keen, his lateral style of inquiry drawing out det🃏ails only 🦩he could.

One woman’s description of an epiphany involvin🌼g a rainbow recalls Timothy Treadwell’s prayer for rain (when lo, it rained). And when Herzog presents a prison chaplain with the echt-Herzog request to “Describe an encounter with a squirrel”, he gets a revelatory response.

“Life is precious,” the reverend weeps, cutting to the heart of a pier🧜cing film that finds affirmative value in the places other filmmakers wouldn&🍨rsquo;t look.