A lie to end all the horrors

Thirteen years ago the British filmmaker Nick Broomfield made a documentary about Aileen Wuornos, a woman sentenced to death for killing seven men while working as an itinerant prostitute in Florida. In 2002 Broomfield was subpoenaed to appear at Wuornos's final state appeal and he made this second film to record the weeks before Wuornos's execution.

At her original trial she recalled an abused childhood and a life of violence on the road. She explained - convincingly, unforgettably - that she had murdered out of self-defence. Now she says she was lying. Her childhood was fine, her travels a laugh, and she killed without even a sigh. She can no longer stand prison and wants death.

While she is clearly lying to die, the truth is that by now she is mentally deranged, which ought to make her unfit for execution. But Florida doesn't object to lethally injecting those who believe they are about to be taken away by angels on a spaceship.

At last comes the terrible day. Broomfield makes his way through the crowd outside the prison - protesters, journalists, all gossiping. He seems quieter than usual. You get the impression he didn't really want to make this film very much at all, that he has spent the long drives to speak to a shackled Wuornos, or to record images of the Michigan forest where she slept rough as a child, gnawing and gnawing his thumbs.

Broomfield, with his spiky films about Courtney Love and Tupac Shakur, has never been so gentle. His voice is small and high. His brows are arched as if some awful sight had fixed them like that. A film about a woman who has lived all the horrors under the horizon, made by a man who seems lost on some lonely road in the world.

Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer
Cert: cert15