D/S: Werner Herzog. P: Freddy Braidy, Jimmy De Brabant, Michael Dounaev, Gerald Green, Kami Naghdi, Nick N. Raslan, Elie Samaha. Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): 20th Century Fox.

Werner Herzog’s extraordinary restaging of the adventures of US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, whose life he had already explored in his 1997 docu Little Dieter Needs to Fly, is another expedition into the director’s hypnotic limbo between fiction and documentary. Shot down during a secret bombing raid over Laos in 1966, Dengler was captured by the Viet Cong and endured almost unimaginable hardships as a POW before finally managing to escape; a bland synopsis that can hardly convey this remarkable man’s resourcefulness and determination to survive. Never satisfied with mere reportage – what Herzog has termed “the accountant’s reality of the photograph” – Herzog’s favoured technique is a curious admixture of reality and fiction, with interview subjects often given scripted, self-consciously poetical dialogue to speak on–camera, the better to convey the truth of their situation. With Rescue Dawn, Herzog inverts his usual formula: instead of taking the documentary form and elevating it towards a fictional ideal, he takes fiction and reinvigorates it with a characteristically stylised approach to realism. The result is strange, bewildering and inexorably compelling.

Herzog paints Dieter as a childlike innocent, almost cartoonishly lacking in guile. Christian Bale matches Herzog’s antirealistic dialogue with his own startlingly antirealistic performance, grinning wildly, chewing lines and scenery with gung-ho relish, determinedly heightening the contrast between the harsh realism of the jungle backdrop and the innate artifice of the filmmaking process. Herzog isn’t so much interested in presenting a fictional account of Dieter Dengler’s harrowing ordeal, as forcing his leading man to recreate it – and relive it – in every particular: and through Bale’s willing self-humiliation, Dengler’s experience becomes ours. In perhaps the bravest performance ever seen from a Hollywood star, Bale gleefully wolfs down handfuls of writhing maggots and worms, pulls slithering leeches from his body, is suspended by his ankles from a gibbet before being cut down and half-drowned in a constricting bamboo cylinder filled with stagnant water, and visibly sheds weight as the fictional-turned-actual brutalities start whittling him away.

With The Machinist, Bale had already shown he was prepared to go all the way to pursue the reality of a character driven to extremes; Rescue Dawn suggests an actor pathologically driven towards self-destruction, egged on by the demands of an uncompromising director, each mesmerised by the other’s abandonment of restraint. This is a film of genuine and unfeigned power, proof that it is still possible for cinema to transmit an authentic jolt of reality in this age of passive escapism and ersatz experience.