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Errol Morris' latest documentary introduces us to Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., an electrical engineer who found himself elevated to the position of "execution expert" when he volunteered to repair, for humanitarian reasons, Tennessee's aging electric chair. Poorly maintained, the chair did not efficiently kill its victims so much as torture them to death. Having established himself as an "expert," Leuchter was hired by other states to overhaul their gas chambers and gallows. He even invented a better mechanism for lethal injection.

As Mr. Death unfolds, we get a picture of Leuchter as an unworldly man. He's knowledgeable and seemingly compassionate, but he's strange—an ur-nerd who lives on 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes per day. His lack of awareness proved so profound that he allowed himself to be hired as an expert witness by Ernst Zundel, a neo-Nazi on trial in Canada for producing the pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?

Zundel sent Leuchter to Auschwitz to collect evidence for his case. Leuchter videotaped himself illegally chipping away portions of the interior walls of the gas chambers, which he then analyzed. These, he claimed, lacked the amount of cyanide that should have been present in a death chamber. He then published The Leuchter Report, in which he concluded that the Holocaust had never occurred.

The firestorm of controversy that ensued proved to be his downfall. He became a figure embroiled in controversy, and states stopped employing him to modernize their execution procedures. As he recounts his tale of woe, he seems stunned that he attracted any attention for his actions. He genuinely cannot fathom what the fuss was all about. He simply did what he thought was logical.

Like all of Errol Morris' films, Mr. Death is a fascinating glimpse into a world that seems similar to the one the viewer inhabits, but is somehow off. What's off here is that Leuchter is almost pathologically unaware of how his actions are viewed by those around him.

Whether you end up being repulsed by Leuchter or sympathetic to him, Mr. Death is impossible to look away from. It is almost entirely footage of talking heads, but its core mystery is so compelling that we really want to know: "What was he thinking?"

We don't get to know that—Morris may not want to know himself—but Mr. Death presents a strangely compelling saga that contents itself with raising the questions and letting us struggle with the answers.