Along with partner Bruce Sinofsky, Joe Berlinger enjoyed extraordinary, nearly unlimited access to Metallica and its group-therapy sessions while making last year's Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. The result was an instant-classic rock documentary of unusual emotional intimacy and candor. Working without Sinofsky, Berlinger had little to no access to either Dr. Heinrich Gross, the shadowy subject of his Cinemax documentary Gray Matter, or to Gross' family members and colleagues; the results are an unsatisfying take on a potentially fascinating subject.
During Hitler's reign, Gross participated in a horrific eugenics experiment involving handicapped children; its brutality earned him the nickname "The Austrian Dr. Mengele." During that time, he helped assemble a formidable collection of brains that he continued to experiment on after the war, with the consent of Austria's government, which not only refused to punish Gross, but relied on him extensively as an expert witness in court cases, even honoring him with a medal at one point. Berlinger traveled to Austria to attend the long-overdue burial of more than 700 of Gross' ill-gotten brains, and he went looking for answers. How could an apparent war criminal like Gross continue to function as a respected member of Austrian society in spite of widespread knowledge of his horrific past? The unsurprising but depressing answer seems to be that he remained useful to a society understandably eager to forget, as quickly and thoroughly as possible, about its complicity in Hitler's genocidal madness.
In interviews with experts and survivors of the eugenics experiments—many of whom were targeted by Gross due to minor psychological problems or antisocial tendencies—Berlinger uncovers a horrific Faustian bargain wherein the Austrian government overlooked Gross' past crimes so long as it could continue to rely on his specialized skills. Unfortunately, Berlinger's inquiry into Gross' life and crimes doesn't travel much beyond the surface. A good deal of Gray Matter is devoted to Berlinger's attempts to talk to the reclusive Gross, but since he never even comes close to conclusively locating the doctor, let alone interviewing him, the space allocated to his interview attempts begins to feel like a way to fill time in lieu of deeper, more substantive revelations that never arrive. Though some of the film's haunting imagery boasts the primal, visceral creepiness of an unnerving horror movie, Gross himself emerges less as a flesh-and-blood human being than as the smudgy, indistinct personification of the banality of evil, a sinister enigma determined to take his dark secrets with him to the grave.