THE KILLER INSIDE ME

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Pulp Noir Goes Psycho-Sexual
Michael Winterbottom Dares You to Watch
By Cole Smithey

Although it falls apart before the final credits, Michael Winterbottom's shamelessly erotic (from a hardcore S&M perspective) "The Killer Inside Me" is a compulsively sadistic take on the 1952 pulp novel by Jim Thompson. The film strives to be a racy post modern noir but falls short, a failure for which John Curran's script adaptation is more to blame than Winterbottom's concise and graphic direction.

Casey Affleck turns in yet another star-making performance, this time as Lou Ford, a polite and unassuming deputy sheriff in the town of Central City, Texas. Everybody thinks they know Lou  as well as their own kin. They don't. Acting on orders of his alcoholic boss, Sheriff Bob Maples (Tom Bower), to run local prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba) out of town, Lou instead falls for the tramp, because she arouses his violent sexual urges (after she slaps him a few too many times). Lou returns the favor in spades. After union leader Joe Rothman (Elias Koteas) confides that Lou's adopted brother died while working on a building site run by big dog businessman Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), Lou dives into a cycle of murder that threatens his relationship with his intended bride Amy (well played by a full-figured Kate Hudson). While some audiences will find the film's sexual brutality excessive, these scenes of acted-out dominance and submission expose the intimate psychological aspects of characters who would otherwise remain inscrutable.

Some audience members will walk out before the movie is over. Others will complain about the gratuitous nature of the fetishistic violence Lou Ford bestows on those he "loves." They will disregard the primal function of insecure attraction that Winterbottom captures with a sincerity that can't be faked. Jessica Alba's Joyce is a masochist and Lou her better-than-ideal sadistic partner. As lovers, they share buried emotional traumas that they can only express and exorcise through shocking ritualized sexual behavior. If the beatings that Lou gives Joyce weren't shocking to the practitioners, they wouldn't keep going back for more. As audience members we're thrust into an ambiguous hot-and-cold intimacy that is at once repellent and yet terribly spellbinding for all of its psychological inertia.  

There's a potent elixir of '50s era sociological undercurrent sloshing around in Jim Thompson's source material that is subversively satirical. Think of it as the "American Psycho" of its day, and you'll be better prepared to digest the intense subtleties on display. It's telling that Stanley Kubrick, a master at handling editorial commentary, hired Thompson to contribute writing duties to "The Killing" (1956) and "Paths of Glory" (1957).

Lou Ford represents a strictly American character archetype. He owns a well-kept house, reads Freud and his father's medical text books, listens to opera, enjoys a good cigar, has a handle on the inner workings of local politics, and hides a ruthless mean streak. He has a "mastermind" quality that enables him to control people and events even when shooting from the hip, a behavioral crutch that expedites his eventual undoing. In short, Lou Ford has all of the qualities of a modern American politician.

In voice-over narration Lou intones, "Out here, you're a man and a gentleman or you aren't anything at all." As the unreliable protagonist through whose eyes we experience the story, the audience is put in the precarious position of delaying our judgment against this slow-talking contradiction of manners and killer instincts. It's why the film is so especially affecting until a loopy hayseed attorney (played by Bill Pullman) crashes the third act into a nonsensical climax. Nevertheless, like many cult films, "The Killer Inside Me" is destined to become a touchstone in spite of its glaring flaws.

Rated R. 108 mins.