Chaos, hostility, and murder. The three items that Werner Herzog believes are the common denominators of the universe, according to the narration of his 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man. And the subject of his own obsession, expressed again and again in the choking jungles and obsessives heroes of his films. In Rescue Dawn, Herzog stabs at yet another heart of darkness, another soul driven to desperation in pursuit of a seemingly impossible goal. In this case, U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler’s escape from a North Vietnamese prison camp deep in the Laotian jungle in the early stages of the Vietnam War.

Herzog tells Dengler’s story for a second time in Rescue Dawn, following his 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, in which he famously took the aging Dengler back to Laos to retrace the steps of his ordeal — including binding his wrists and hiring locals to play the part of his captors in the reenactment. That Herzog’s first real narrative film since 2001’s disappointing Invincible is a retread of this previous material was cause for legitimate concern: after spending most of the last two decades making documentaries, perhaps that well had run dry. But Dawn delivers.

The film begins and ends on deceptively conventional notes, on board Dengler’s aircraft carrier. On the surface, they’re scenes right out of the war film textbook. There are the standard displays at the start of male bravado, hot shot pilots laughing in the face of death, and in the end the usual hero’s welcome. But they only serve to contrast the meat of the film, bookends to the nightmare that begins when he is shot down while flying his very first mission as a Navy pilot, a role he’d dreamed of ever since his childhood in a Germany ravaged by the second world war.