By the end of the feature-length frustration that is “Standard Operating Procedure,” the maverick documentarian Errol Morris reminds you of the oblivious, tunnel-vision eccentrics from his past films. Where other filmmakers and writers have looked at the infamous photos of the Abu Ghraib scandal and sought to chronicle the relevant events and policies, Mr. Morris ties himself into knots by questioning photographic truth and by embellishing the events with luxuriant re-enactments in this misguided and ill-defined endeavor.

Mr. Morris’s spirit of inquiry dates to his pioneering 1988 film “The Thin Blue Line,” about an unsolved Texas murder riddled by conflicting accounts. But it falters when applied to a grim, all-too-well-known piece of modern American history that cries out for clarity and responsibility. As “Standard Operating Procedure” cycles through interviews with so-called “bad apple” MPs from Abu Ghraib, there’s the nagging sense that Mr. Morris is operating in a sociopolitical vacuum, slotting pungent details and events into his usual voyeuristic tale-telling.

Limiting its purview to the Iraq prison, the film focuses on the abusive practices and grotesque photography as filtered through the experiences of several young MPs. These include some of the infamously dubbed “bad apples” prosecuted for their involvement, such as Lynndie England, Javal Davis, and irrepressible shutterbug Sabrina Harman (aka “the thumbs-up girl”). Notably absent is apparent lead instigator Charles Graner (in jail), but Mr. Morris supplements the cast (as the credits call them) with Janis Karpinski, a brigadier general who was scapegoated for the crimes, and Tim Dugan, a privately contracted interrogator appalled by them.

Intercut with their invariably insufficient explanations and accounts of shock, curiosity, stupidity, and romance are brief, moodily staged sequences. Some are atmospheric evocations of the prison corridors and cells, which are haunted by double-exposed “ghosts” (the term for prisoners hidden from outside scrutiny). Others, shot in hypnotic slow motion, are luxuriant impressionistic snippets that serve to illustrate stories: the raging jaws of guard dogs, or even a plummeting helicopter that figured in one of Ms. Harman’s dreams.

These cinematic sequences have attracted no small reproach in early reactions to the film, and they do suggest Mr. Morris’s poor reckoning of his subject matter, on any number of grounds. Unlike the often obscure figures in his past films (“Mr. Death,” “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control”), the unforgettable images and accounts from Abu Ghraib do not cry out for enhancement or creative reinterpretation. The hallucinogenic clarity of these re-enactments belittles the power of the actual events by evoking an antiseptic, stage-managed horror effect.

That’s not to say Mr. Morris’s aesthetic sense has no place in this documentary. In fact, this expert interviewer (whose voice is rarely heard) makes an exquisite portrait out of every subject’s face, each feeling palpably alive and decidedly un-monstrous. Ms. Harman and Ms. England are especially striking: one the dimpled picture of a ’50s child-housewife, with brightly curious eyes, the other a drawling slab of a head, tilted on her shoulders like a boxer with something broken, her eyelids a little slow on the uptake.

To some extent, Mr. Morris intends a sense of suspension with these shots, which are done against black backgrounds and sometimes jump-cut to new positions within the frame. Likewise, the slow-motion re-creations often dwell on particulate matter (spittle, blood) hanging in the air. The effect is to arrest time in a way unlike other documentaries, which are full of motion, distraction, and plot imperative, and it’s probably tied to a desire to lodge us in this underworld, these moments of horror.

But it also underlines Mr. Morris’s habit of setting up a steady rhythm of oddity in his films; only here, “oddity” doesn’t cut it, though he parcels out macabre details such as Graner caressing a kitten in a home video, or a re-creation of ants swarming a prisoner. The director’s streak for fictionalizing with details, his B-movie world as it were, feels out of place here. And the re-enactments feel oblivious to the post-terrorism mediascapes with which viewers have already been reckoning, namely rampant torture horror in movies and television, and the imminent mortality on display in Iraq war docs.

As for the actual photographs (and some video) shown in the film, Mr. Morris takes an investigative approach, deploying an analyst originally tasked with compiling evidence against the soldiers. When nifty graphics compare time-date stamps from different soldiers’ cameras, the director again seems to be pursuing the wrong sort of context, consistent with his vivid sense of space but myopically materialist. You’d rather hear more sallies like Mr. Morris’s almost amusing question, delivered in his usual nasally back-of-the-room yelp, “Did any of this seem weird?” Or what about discussing the MPs’ photos in terms of the well-known grunt habit of snapping bodies and freakish sights in the line of duty?

At the end, Mr. Morris’s saved-up curveball explains the title by exposing which cruel practices were, in fact, within the rules (whatever they might be). And Ms. England throws a monkey wrench into an absolutist analysis of the scandal’s various contingencies by proclaiming her love for her son by Charles Graner, who might not have existed otherwise. These two moments alone leave one twisting in ways the rest of the documentary fails to.

Ultimately, the problem of “Standard Operating Procedure” isn’t the same as the one that sullied Mr. Morris’s 2004 film “The Fog of War ” — misplaced, skewed focus on a big, complicated event. The shortfall comes with the truisms that Mr. Morris presents as insight, and the sense that voyeurism about people’s denial just isn’t that interesting in a case such as this. In a way, by limiting his focus to his one-on-one interviews with the participants, he unwittingly replicates the unwillingness of media coverage to explore the larger context, and perpetuates a myth of incomprehensibility that tends to obscure such events.