Wisconsin Death Trip is a 1999 docudrama film written for the screen and directed by James Marsh, based on the 1973 historical nonfiction book of the same name by Michael Lesy.

The film was produced over approximately four years, with Marsh intermittently shooting the reenactment footage on location in Wisconsin over a one-and-a-half-year period.

Religious delusion also plagues the local communities: John Isaacson holds the members of a Christian meeting at knifepoint, believing himself to be vanquishing Satan.

After Edgar steals cement to repair their dilapidating house, the two are put on trial, during which Pauline engages in incoherent rants and espouses anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, leading her to be declared legally insane and institutionalized at Mendota Hospital.

While numerous business ventures collapse in tandem with the economy, adulterous affairs amongst the region's middle-aged residents lead to further violence and murder.

Meanwhile, Mary Sweeny is released from the psychiatric hospital, and continues to travel aimlessly throughout the region, committing further destruction of windows, including at an Eau Claire train station.

[8] Verrone describes the film as a "hodgepodge of collage and assemblage, a fertile mix of appropriated text and image that results in a somber study of real-life hardship and depredation".

[9] Documentary filmmaker James Marsh began developing a docudrama film adaptation of Michael Lesy's 1973 nonfiction book of the same name after moving to the United States in 1995.

"[10] To shoot the reenactment footage featured in the film, Marsh hired Danish cinematographer Eigil Bryld, with whom his wife had attended school in Denmark.

[13] Approximately nine and a half weeks of shooting occurred over a year-and-a-half period throughout Wisconsin, in the cities of Green Bay, Milwaukee, Cassville, and Appleton.

[16] Wisconsin Death Trip was rejected for distribution by several European companies, who deemed it "morbid, distasteful and obsessed with the wrong aspects of human life", and the filmmakers' submission of it to the PBS series American Experience was met with no response.

[14] Jonathan Romney of The Guardian praised the film as "always lyrical, sometimes blackly farcical, and sometimes terrifying, as it reveals the romanticized American frontier's true desperation".

[22] Dennis Harvey of Variety similarly praised it as a "mordantly humorous, original work [that] makes a striking first impression", though he conceded that its structure becomes "repetitious after a while".

[23] Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle provided an opposing point of view regarding the film's structure, noting that it moves "both symbolically and literally through the four seasons, [as] Ian Holm's narration grows more alarmed, more troubled".

[1] Walter Addiego of the San Francisco Examiner made a similar criticism, noting that the film "strays when it offers color footage of the town today, with the too-easy implication that some things never change".

[25] The Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington echoed a similar sentiment, describing the contemporary footage as "slightly sarcastic" in contrast to the "black and white evocations of a distant past that nag like recurring, dread-filled dreams".

[37] Also in 2004, Tartan Video released a region-free DVD in the United Kingdom which also contains the commentary and deleted scenes, though the behind-the-scenes documentary is not present.