The Killer Inside me

The Killer Inside me – Michael Winterbottom directed this adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel in 2010. The film stars Casey Affleck as a mealy-mouthed, drawling Texas psychopath along with Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson as his unfortunate girl friends – Affleck’s psycho pummels them to death in graphic, stomach-churning detail. Winterbottom is a good director and his films are always interesting. Thompson’s material is pure pulp fiction; the text is story-boarded comic strip or movie script even before it’s a novel. (Thompson was the king of ultra-violent fifties noir pulp; he gravitated to the film industry, or its members gravitated to him – he worked extensively with Kubrick and Peckinpah among others). The Killer Inside Me is compelling but very nasty. Affleck plays the son of a small-town doctor who has become a deputy sheriff – he is a sadist both sexually and otherwise. Dispatched to pay blackmail money to a local prostitute, he becomes entangled in a sadomasochistic relationship with her, plots to kill the dupe paying the blackmail, and, then, in a shocking scene brutally murders both the prostitute and her john. The killings leave some loose ends – resulting in more murders. Affleck’s character has a long-suffering girlfriend, whom he also beats for his amusement, and he batters her to death as well. The killings of the women are extremely disturbing and they wrench the film from noir entertainment into something much more grisly and horrific. Affleck plays his part speaking in a reedy, querulous high-pitched voice so reedy and laid-back that half of his lines are unintelligible. Like many stock villains, he’s a fan of German late-Romantic music – we hear Mahler’s 2nd Symphony on the soundtrack and Im Abendrot from Strauss’ Four Last Songs. The picture is modestly shot, eschews any big dramatic sequences, and very matter-of-fact – the photography is serviceable and efficient and the plot is convincingly developed. Winterbottom shoots on location in Tulsa (standing in for Fort Worth) and northern New Mexico for some of the mountainous exteriors representing west Texas and the scenery and small-town milieu is represented in a persuasive manner. But the murders of the two women are simply too brutal for the slight genre plot. The effect is similar to some of Hitchcock’s pictures, most notable Frenzy, which interrupts its rather cozy police procedural with horrific images of rape and murder. (Hitchcock got away with this in Psycho, but when he tried the same thing in Frenzy the effect was simply sadistic and mean-spirited.) I’m ambivalent about this film – it’s very well-made, intriguingly acted, and gripping, but too hideously graphic to be entertaining.