MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE KILLER INSIDE ME'

The Pulp Inside Him as It Turns to Rot​

New York Times review by A.O. Scott -  June 17, 2010

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“Around here, if you’re not a man and a gentleman, you’re nothing,” says Lou Ford, the protagonist of “The Killer Inside Me.” A murderous sociopath, cowardly and cold and particularly brutal toward women, Lou is in effect introducing the tale of his own self-annihilation. On the surface a polite, upstanding fellow — a sheriff’s deputy with fine manners and a clean white shirt — Lou guides us on a grisly tour of the abyss that is his soul.

The Texas town where he lives is a place, at least in Michael Winterbottom’s nasty and uneven adaptation of Jim Thompson’s surpassingly mean little crime novel, where traditional courtesies coexist uneasily with the energy and corruption of the 1950s oil boom. (The film is set in 1958, six years after the book’s publication, perhaps to avoid anachronism in the musical selections). Not that Lou, played by Casey Affleck, is a symbol of economic progress or social disorder. As conceived by Thompson and embodied by Mr. Affleck (Stacy Keach played the character in an earlier film version), Lou is something much sicker and more interesting.

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At one point he reaches up to a bookshelf displaying volumes of Freud and takes down a Bible. Tucked between its pages is a stash of pornographic snapshots, apparently taken by Lou’s father. That brief scene suggests a lode of pathology rich enough to keep a team of psychiatrists in business for years, or else, as it happens, to get a bunch of people killed.

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The first of these is Joyce (Jessica Alba), a prostitute who lives on the edge of town and becomes the eager masochistic object of Lou’s sadistic lust. The first time they meet, she slaps his face and he whips her with his belt. Thereafter they dwell in secret erotic bliss, at least until he beats her to death with his gloved fists in a scene that brings an unpleasantly graphic connotation to the idea of pulp fiction.

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Mr. Winterbottom, a protean and prolific filmmaker, has often shown an interest in finding the point where cinematic artifice collides with literalism. Movies like “The Road to Guantánamo” and “In This World” blur the line between fiction and documentary, reconstructing true stories with nonprofessional actors in real locations. “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” pretends to be a movie about the failed making of a movie, while “9 Songs” is, technically if not quite in spirit, a work of hard-core pornography.

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The explicit brutality of “The Killer Inside Me” seems to aim for a similar transgression, startling us with a bloody truth that other movies would only suggest. But of course the violence is no more actual — and no less stylized — than anything else in the movie. It is also linked, visually and thematically, with the film’s teasingly salacious depictions of sex in a way that suggests a director primarily concerned with finding out what he can get away with, and not entirely sure what he’s doing.

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Jim Thompson had no such trouble. His book’s first-person narrative turns a tight thriller into a psychological case study and a candid, unhinged pseudo-memoir. In the best pulp tradition the novel mixes up breathless prurience and shocked moralism — you can be turned on, but only if you’re also horrified — as it sends its main character down the slippery slope from kinky sex play to vicious homicide. Along the way there are lies, double-crosses, blackmail schemes gone awry and an atmosphere of depravity that is both disturbing and, partly by dint of Thompson’s matchless literary artistry, exhilarating.

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Mr. Winterbottom’s film, written by John Curran, is clearly enamored of the novel and labors to be true to its durable, somewhat appalling power. But while the filmmakers succeed in evoking the queasy, lurid ambiance of Thompson’s hothouse world, they can’t quite figure out how to duplicate his remorseless storytelling skill. Plot may be secondary to sensation in a movie like this, but it nonetheless has to be handled cleanly, and the narrative here, which should be intriguingly complicated, is just plain messy. Characters show up and start talking — a seedy union official played by Elias Koteas, a powerful businessman played by Ned Beatty, a skeptical federal agent played by Simon Baker — and their labored exposition obscures more than it clarifies.

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Lou, who has a respectable fiancée named Amy (Kate Hudson), also has a dark history, suggested in confusing flashbacks and oblique conversations, that involves possible murder, sexual abuse and other family secrets. This background may or may not explain Lou’s descent into criminality — the murders he commits can be interpreted as part of a long-gestating plan of revenge — but it is explored in such a lumbering, incoherent way that the film becomes blurry and distracted just when it should be gathering momentum and force.

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Mr. Affleck, with his reedy voice and sneaky Boy Scout demeanor — Eddie Haskell on his way to strangle a puppy in the Cleavers’ back yard — turns out to be perfect for Lou Ford, and his performance is the most effective thing in “The Killer Inside Me.” His Lou, a doctor’s son who lives in a stately house where he listens to opera records and thumbs through bulky old books, often looks like a little boy trying on grown-up clothes.

Even when he drops his voice to a menacing whisper or blows a confrontational gust of smoke from one of his cigars, Mr. Affleck registers a hint of panicky uncertainty. And when he is perpetrating the unflinchingly filmed acts of violence that have already made this movie somewhat controversial, he seems almost as vulnerable as his victims. You may feel a twinge of sympathy for this monster, a strange and vivid character who deserves all the torments of hell, and also a better movie.