The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Set in an oil-boom Texas town in the 1950s and based on Jim Thomson’s 58-year-old novel of the same name, The Killer Inside Me is a grotesque, uneven entry into the film noir genre. Its violence is stomach turning, but the film doesn’t seem to know why. Neither will you.

In the film, Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, a seemingly nice guy. He’s the surviving son of the once-small town’s doctor. He lives in his childhood home, among his father’s library of volumes that include both Freud and the Bible, listens to classical music on the Victrola, and wears clean white shirts and polished cowboy boots to his job as a deputy sheriff.

When his boss (Tom Bower) sends Lou to evict a prostitute named Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba) from her cottage on the edge of town, a long-dormant violence inside of Lou is suddenly awakened. Joyce suggests a blackmail plot to dupe the son of Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), a wealthy local businessman so that she and Lou can run off together. But Lou has something more sinister in mind for both the Conways–who may or may not have caused the death of his stepbrother–and Joyce.

Lou ends his sadomasochistic affair with the hooker, to whom he has previously doled out spankings and other punishments by consent, by brutally beating her face in, shooting the younger Conway in the head, and making it seem like the pair of murders was a lover’s quarrel gone awry. The whole scene is slow, relentless and excessively cruel. Not just to its character but also to its audience. Then, Lou calmly continues his previously established relationship with eager good girl Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson) before discovering that his inner sociopath, once awakened, cannot be put back to sleep.

The rest, as presented by screenwriter John Curran and director Michael Winterbottom, is a violent, brutal jumble. We know that Lou’s childhood includes trauma and abuse and that someone–it’s unclear if it’s his brother who was accused of the crime or Lou himself–also had a hand in the rape and murder of a child. Prettily shot flashback scenes (at least as prettily as rape and incest can be shot) are included to explain these things but turn out to be so confusing that they actually make matters worse.

Characters are introduced willy-nilly and then abandoned for long stretches. These include a union boss (Elias Koteas), a doomed patsy (Liam Aiken), a dubious district attorney (Simon Baker), a homeless grifter (Brent Briscoe) and a character whose occupation and raison d’etre I’m still not entirely certain of (Bill Pullman). When they do re-enter the movie, it is seemingly out of thin air. And their re-introduction ends up taking you out of the narrative rather than driving you forward in it.

Winterbottom does make some interesting juxtaposed directorial choices. Approximately every third scene in the film is of sex–whether it is real-time, flashback, or dream sequence–but the actresses never show so much as a nipple. In terms of music, the film is largely silent…except when downright jolly 1950′s country music underscores the bloodiest of crimes. Most scenes are flat and colorless, but the bruises and welts on women’s bodies are shot in close-up detail and in full Technicolor, as kaleidoscopic bursts of red, purple, yellow and green. But it’s not clear why. All of these seem to speak to Winterbottom’s desire to push his audience’s buttons and not really in service of the story.

The best parts of The Killer Inside Me are its actor’s performances. Casey Affleck parlays his small-framed, boyish likeability into something terrifying when paired with Lou’s murderous megalomania. Elias Koteas, perplexingly placed as he is in this movie, seems so custom-made for the film-noir genre that I wonder why I’ve never seen him playing a shady, hard-drinking type like this before. And Kate Hudson is as good as she was in Almost Famous.

Ultimately, solid performances can’t change the fact that The Killer Inside Me is little more than an excuse to amass a pile of lifeless bodies. It’s plenty revolting but never seductive enough to make that revulsion work in its favor.

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