Aesop once said, "Men often applaud an imitation and hiss the real thing." Michael Winterbottom's graphic adaptation of Jim Thompson's controversial landmark of pulp fiction, The Killer Inside Me, falls directly into the hissing category. When screened at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the film was not only booed but Winterbottom publicly lambasted for the movie's stark depiction of violence against women. Critics found the brutality too "misogynistic and degrading," but Winterbottom - the Brit director of Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People - defended his film as an authentic adaptation, noting that real violence is inherently dark and ugly. What the controversy speaks to most, however, is the adaptation of cult or controversial works.
Recently, the big-budget adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (long regarded as unfilmable) was both heralded as an artistic highpoint and criticized for its fidelity to the original text. While Watchmen director Zack Snyder reproduced the comic panels directly to film, staging every shot the way it was originally drawn, Winterbottom similarly captures Thompson's pulp brutality and delivers it without any varnish of fantasy or cinematic trickery. There is simply no distancing between the sociopathic mind at the heart of Killer and what is splashed across the screen.
And yeah, that's pretty unsettling.
The Killer Inside Me follows psychopathic Texas sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) as he slowly unravels after brutally murdering a prostitute (Jessica Alba) and her suitor (Jay R. Ferguson), the son of a construction magnate. Attempting to cover up the crime, Lou winds up weaving a complicated and vicious web of lies and is soon forced to kill again. And again.
What makes Lou Ford such a reprehensible character is also what makes him so frighteningly realistic. There is no elaborate explanation (despite flashbacks to incest and childhood abuse), no justification for his viciousness. As portrayed by Affleck, with his boyish charms and squeaky voice, Ford is a demon in disguise. He manipulates people the way a child manipulates his toys; when those people finally break, he merely throws them away without a second thought. Unknowable and uncaring, he is the worst kind of monster: one that cannot be truly defeated because it cannot be explained.
Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind's flat, brownish, washed out tones lend the film a dusty look in keeping with its rural Texas setting, but there is nothing consciously arty about the style. Unlike other films in the neo-noir genre, there are no dramatic camera moves or angles that call attention to themselves, no overdone art direction to distract the viewer. The acting in Killer is equally subdued and realistic. Alba, mostly seen only in a single hotel room, plays the standard sex kitten with a damaged past, but her character never feels contrived. Still, however developed other characters might be, they all orbit the black hole of Affleck's psychopath.
Winterbottom has indeed done what his critics accuse him of doing. With The Killer Inside Me he has crafted an adaptation that so directly translates the brutality of Thompson's original novel that the film becomes an endurance test. In his quest for authenticity, the director has delivered the ultimate journey into the heart of darkness, and few viewers will make it through unscathed.
