True Films: Mr. Death

Mr. Death

Let’s follow an odd fellow as he strives to perfect the electric chair for the death penalty. By his calculations, the quicker the more humane. He shows us how he does this for various prisons in the US. He then goes on to “perfect” the lethal injection machine, the gallows, and eventually the gas chamber — all for humanitarian reasons of course. His supposed expertise in the gas chambers leads to an invitation by revisionists to examine the gas chambers of the Holocust. Once our hero does his naive engineering analysis in a stealth visit to the death camps ruins, he comes back converted as a Holocust denier. And then his life gets really interesting. This is a story about the consequences of expertise without context or guiding morality. Like all of Erol Morris documentaries, it is extremely well done.

— KK