A scene from Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris's documentary about the prisoner-abuse controversy inside Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. (Nubar Alexanian/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

It is not surprising that American documentarian Errol Morris worked as a private investigator before becoming a filmmaker. For almost two decades, Morris has been making films that stalk and interrogate like the wiliest gumshoe. In 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, Morris’s camera so closely examined a random roadside murder in Texas that a jailed suspect was actually freed based on evidence from the film.

Morris’s movies are about ways of seeing, and the altered meaning that comes from a simple shift in perspective. This approach sometimes gives rise to an unlikable smugness, placing Morris at a clinical distance from his subject. The electrical chair guru and Holocaust denier documented in Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter was lost in Morris’s signature high-art treatment; he became comic and almost incidental to the florid visuals. But with The Fog of War, Morris unpacked a challenging perspective on the Vietnam War through intensely revealing interviews with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He made the past palpable, and our understanding of it urgent.

In Standard Operating Procedure, Morris turns his attention to more recent history: the infamous photographs of detainee abuse taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Morris enters the debate through a side door, not focusing directly on the events, but rather on the pictures taken by those who were there. Five of the seven military police indicted for their actions — Megan Ambuhl, Javal Davis, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman and Jeremy Sivitz — sit against coolly neutral photo-booth-like backdrops and speak. (Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner were still in jail.) This little group is blamed, to varying degrees, for the human pyramids and images of forced masturbation, pictures that are reproduced ad nauseam in the film and still jar us to the core almost five years after they were leaked to the world. But are these captured moments anomalous criminal acts or standard operating procedure — the first step in the “softening up” of prisoners for interrogation — or torture? Was the mistake the deeds, or was the mistake that someone photographed them?

Errol Morris, director of Standard Operating Procedure. (Mark Lipson/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

It’s strange to hear at last the voice of Lynndie England, who exists forever in those still and silent pictures as the androgynous little girl with the gunshot fingers and the prisoner on the leash. With her hair grown out, she speaks in a deep-throated, womanly twang. She is now a mother, in fact, to a boy fathered (but never acknowledged) by her superior at Abu Ghraib, Spc. Charles Graner. Graner comes out in the narrative as a mustachioed ringleader and unlikely Lothario; he is serving a 10-year term for prisoner abuse.

Using an overly technical “forensics” kind of approach — it’s CSI meets NPR — Morris gets his subjects to speak to what is not documented in the photos. As one MP says, “You don’t see outside the frame.” England defends her participation in the photos — clumsily — by saying that she was in love, trying to please her lover, Graner. The use of female soldiers — strategic, presumably — to humiliate Muslim detainees is one of the keys to what happened at Abu Ghraib, but I can’t entirely buy into the full-on gender-studies reading of these horrors as sold by England. When she rolls her eyes about what she did for love and says, “Men, right?” it’s hard to get all “Tell me about it, sister!” Somehow, I don’t want to share a Cosmo with her.

Sabrina Harman took the most pictures, always grinning and doing the thumbs-up, even over the thawing corpse of a prisoner-on-ice who was likely murdered during interrogation. “You just need to do something with your hands when a picture is taken,” she explains about the thumbs. Harman is a shadowy figure, someone who suffers from an inexpressive voice and all-around flatness; she would win no public favour if a dingo ate her baby.But Harman’s story reveals the iceberg emergence of a conscience, at least according to letters she wrote home to Kelly, the woman she calls her wife. At first, Harman thought it was kind of “funny” to watch prisoners handcuffed to bunk beds with panties on their heads. But eventually, her photos stopped functioning as summer camp mementos and became evidence. “The only reason I want to be [here] is to get the pictures and prove that the U.S. is not what they think,” she wrote.

The film doesn’t really rescue these grunts from themselves; almost all seem unable to synthesize the meaning of what they did or, at least, saw. Harman clicked one of the most famous pictures of all: the man in the peaked hood with the wires dripping from his fingers. The image, with the grainy Christ pose and the aspect of a supernatural fantasy novel, became a metonym for the whole shameful scandal, reprinted on T-shirts and inspiring artists and comedians. Just as England defensively — almost desperately — points out that the leash she held her prisoner on was harmlessly slack, Harman explains that the man in the hood (whom they called “Gilligan”) was posed for a sight gag: the wires were attached to nothing. Arms out, standing on a box is apparently a typical “stress position” in interrogations. The hood was a blanket to help Gilligan keep warm. Later, he became a chum around the prison, helping to tidy up.

As Morris’s subjects pat around in the intellectual mud for reasons for what happened, the most persuasive rationale turns out to be: why not? Soldiers had received orders to “go Gitmo” and turn this decayed and dangerous pit, Hussein’s former torture palace, into the earliest stop of the interrogation process. “Softening up” prisoners could mean anything, so it did.

Lynndie England, a U.S. Army private who posed with prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. (Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media)

The soldiers were living in horrible conditions, and many of Harman’s shots show military personnel sleeping in their own filthy prison cells on dirty, sheetless mattresses. The compound sat in the middle of a war zone, under constant fire. But is it enough to say the conditions were inhuman, so the soldiers surviving them behaved inhumanly? Were they simply working through their shock and trauma by getting up to frat-house shenanigans — wildly misinterpreted by those outside the army culture — or is something systemically toxic? Janis Karpinski, former brigadier general of the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq, seethes in several interviews, saying that she took the fall for following orders while those a step above her and beyond remain untouched.

Morris is a great technician: He dramatizes the interviews by inserting images of vicious dogs and helicopters exploding. He uses computer-generated imagery and shows photos drifting through the air in empty cellblocks, the import underlined and boldfaced by Danny Elfman’s frantic, electronic soundtrack.

But the esthetic is uncomfortable; it’s all a little unnecessary, considering the subject. The only images we need are the images we have, and Morris tries too hard to compete with them. It’s almost like he felt defeated by the inconclusiveness of the story. There will likely be no one released from jail because of this film, no tidy ending. Abu Ghraib was a mess, and everyone involved, top to bottom, claims inertness and lack of agency. The absences are a presence: George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are barely mentioned. With a little desperation, Morris inserts, via special effects, commanders who wander ghost-like in the hallways of the prison, nudging the MPs towards their fall.

All of this leads, quite clearly, to Susan Sontag’s famous essay “On Photography,” in which she writes: “To photograph … means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power.”

Someone did have power at Abu Ghraib — power to induce it, power to stop it, power to say no. A straighter, less self-impressed documentary might crack open that power and show us the writhing tendons within, and what knowledge they’re attached to. Morris the investigator is thrown off course by Morris the auteur, and Standard Operating Procedure — despite the visceral impact of all those photos — is not the powerful indictment it should have been. It is a good film, but not the film we need.

Standard Operating Procedure opens May 2 in Toronto.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.