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My friends and I made an unexpected find yesterday at the video store, thanks to a “free documentary with any rental” deal at Quickflix. We grabbed Grizzly Man, a documentary by Werner Herzog about the conservationist-filmmaker Tim Treadwell.

The story is pretty simple, and uncannily similar to the plot of Into The Wild, another movie (based on a book) based on real events. Tim Treadwell is a troubled, aspiring actor in California who finds the answer to his life crisis in filming and advocating for the preservation of grizzly bears in Alaska. He goes on summer-long expeditions alone in the wilderness, only rarely accompanied by his girlfriend, and delivers rambling expositions on nature, conservation, and the meaning of life in front of a tripod-mounted camera. Treadwell’s offbeat, exuberant, and frequently profane manner belies how impeccably composed and crystal clear each shot really is — Herzog seems to match this style in the interviews he shoots with Treadwell’s friends and family. Each interview is established by a few seconds of silence, and often progresses with a barely imperceptible zoom into the subject or a sideways pan, as if to mirror the inexorable, fateful unwinding of Treadwell’s own life.

The filming sometimes has such a quiet quality that the dimensionality of what is being filmed seems to disappear. The lush grass and picture-perfect mountains become a photograph, and Tim’s larger-than-reality persona a digital artifact or a trick of the blue screen gesticulating wildly on top of the flatness of the wilderness. After all, as Herzog himself confesses, he is less interested in nature than he is in the story of Treadwell as a person, and in the story of every person as told indirectly through him.

The punchline is tragedy. After more than a decade out in the Alaskan wilderness, Tim is attacked in his tent by a grizzly bear in an audio-recorded sequence that is alluded to and described in terrifying detail but never directly replayed in the film. His girlfriend, who is actually afraid of bears, stays with him, and both are killed and eaten. The end is baffling and gruesome, and forms the basis for Herzog’s own appraisal of nature: “He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe that the common denominator in nature is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

Why, then, did Tim seem to have so much faith in and love for these creatures? Was he simply too naive or impassioned to see the chaos and hostility that the filmmaker saw in nature? Or did Tim understand something that even Herzog couldn’t? Maybe that’s why Herzog chose Tim as his subject, and why we are so gripped by a story that seems on the surface to be so absurd and disturbing, but ultimately enlightening, and even cathartic to watch.