The Killer Inside Me

Call­ing Michael Win­ter­bot­tom a cin­e­mat­ic nomad would per­haps attach an unwar­rant­ed mys­tique to the director’s errat­ic, if occa­sion­al­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, career to date. Hop­ping between gen­res, styles, peri­ods and loca­tions like some kind of mad prog rock alchemist, the more films he makes – and it’s been an aver­age of about one a year for the past decade – the tougher it becomes to detect any over­all pur­pose or the­mat­ic con­sis­ten­cy in his work.

Unlike, say, Kubrick or Hawks, he lacks a dis­tinct autho­r­i­al stamp, a key trait or abid­ing inter­est which would help us not only ratio­nalise his choice of mate­r­i­al, but allow us to view his films as the prod­uct of an artist.

His lat­est, The Killer Inside Me, per­pet­u­ates the prob­lem. It’s a sweaty, sand-blast­ed pulp noir based on a nov­el by Jim Thomp­son that belongs to a warped fam­i­ly of films that attempt to human­ise psy­chopaths, from Amer­i­can Psy­cho to Rober­to Suc­co to Hen­ry: Por­trait of a Ser­i­al Killer.

Cast-wise, this is eas­i­ly Winterbottom’s most star-span­gled movie to date; yet its leisure­ly pac­ing, aus­tere sub­ject mat­ter and more-is-more atti­tude to screen vio­lence means that it’s the type of thing the stu­dios wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

Casey Affleck deliv­ers a com­mit­ted turn as emo­tion­al­ly vacant small town Deputy Sher­iff Lou Ford, an appar­ent­ly clean-cut south­ern gent who, it tran­spires, is prone to bouts of pre­med­i­tat­ed bru­tal­i­ty against friends, lovers and asso­ciates. The film chron­i­cles the swift unrav­el­ling of his sadis­tic world via an attempt to black­mail a local prop­er­ty tycoon (Ned Beat­ty), with Ford using his mea­gre pow­ers of law enforce­ment to sub­tly engi­neer sit­u­a­tions to suit his homi­ci­dal whims.

Though Affleck’s per­for­mance is cut from a sim­i­lar lov­able-rogue-with-vio­lent-ten­den­cies cloth as his turns in Gone Baby Gone and The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James, Lou Ford is per­haps his most omi­nous and inde­fen­si­ble char­ac­ter to date. Apart from the few flash­backs that show his var­i­ous child­hood trau­mas (includ­ing the bizarre roots of his spank­ing fetish), the rea­sons for his mur­der­ous dri­ve are left unan­swered. Like the title sug­gests, he’s just a reg­u­lar Joe who’s got the dev­il in his soul. And that’s it.

Though you’d be hard pressed to see the film as any­thing if not robust, there is lit­tle evi­dence that Win­ter­bot­tom has tried to give the source mate­r­i­al his own per­son­al spin. Beyond Lou Ford, the var­i­ous side-play­ers feel like lit­tle more than sin­gle-note ciphers whose only pur­pose is to keep the plot mov­ing for­ward. It leaves you to won­der what fun a more resource­ful film­mak­er (the Coens, per­haps) would have had fash­ion­ing these juicy arche­types into mem­o­rable characters.

Ulti­mate­ly, though, this is a film which will live or die in your mem­o­ry based on your reac­tion to a scene of almost unwatch­able vio­lence that occurs with­in the open­ing half an hour, and which has duly invoked com­par­isons to both Gas­par Noé’s Irréversible and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Cer­tain­ly the extrem­i­ty of the mate­r­i­al marks this out as anoth­er piece of test-your-met­tle cin­e­ma, but whether its inclu­sion has any intel­lec­tu­al basis is high­ly questionable.