Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Based on the novel by Jim Thompson
Featuring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Elias Koteas, Simon Baker
Be afraid. The Killer Inside Me is a true story.
No, the events may not have happened just like this. The maze-like descent into manipulation and murder that director, Michael Winterbottom and the novel’s author, Jim Thompson detail likely never occurred...
It’s true all the same, because The Killer Inside Me is a tight, stark anatomical study of a garden-variety sociopath’s mind. Men like Casey Affleck’s character, Lou Ford, are out there. They seem so normal, so charming, so interested in you. That’s one of the tricks they play that gets them off on their own power. Then they get you in the bedroom or slip a ring on your finger, and it’s time for the sickness to come out and play.
Incarceration in such a mind is what you can expect from The Killer Inside Me. Jim Thompson, through the able screenwriting hand of John Curran and the spot-on directorial style of Michael Winterbottom, sews Lou’s story into a strait-jacket-tight film noir plot, but the twists and intrigue aren’t really the subject of the film. They keep you guessing while the core of the picture—imprisonment in the psychopath’s world view—pounds and whispers at you with disturbing accuracy.
For such an air-tight piece of film, Winterbottom has a big puncture at the end with a change of cinematic tone. He bookends the piece with opening credits and climactic scene that literally sing with sardonic humor. This is a bad call with such a stark drama. It’s like going from reading gut-wrenching True Crime to watching a particularly cheesy episode of Bones. You sit for 108 minutes of eating ashes only to get a pixie stick poured down your throat. The end credits hit with an upbeat jazz number and the audience is left wondering if it was just a really distasteful joke.
But up to the point where The Killer Inside Me goes from pissing blood in your eyes to trying to pat you on the back and share a laugh, it’s all-around good. By 'good,' I mean hideously realistic. The narrative is as lean and wild as a roller coaster rail, following Lou Ford from his fascination with a masochistic prostitute, Joyce (Jessica Alba) through his gruesome revenge scheme against a very florid Ned Beatty that leads from one cover-up killing to the next, all the way to a fiery Armageddon. You get no larded dialogue and no tedious background—just poked and punched by plot points interspersed by Casey Affleck mooning over his foxy obsessions. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind has worked with Winterbottom on several of his more down-to-earth pieces and it shows—they strike a smart balance between sidetracks into Lou’s fantasies and the on-target shots a taut drama needs. Winterbottom, John Carran and Marcel Zyskind assemble an animal of a film without an ounce of fat or sugar in it, as Thompson’s noir-perfect writing deserves.
That animal is one sick puppy though, and audiences expecting the mellow chills of a Hannibal Lecter film or cartoonish Rob Zombie raving will be more than disappointed. They’ll be screwed in the skull by the casual way The Killer Inside Me smashes the viewer with stunningly realistic violence and then goes back to whistling and grinning. That’s the message—that human predators don’t roar monologues from FBI-besieged dungeons with a homemade mask of a girl’s face in one hand and a smoking chainsaw in the other. Lou takes his sweet, Kate Hudson fiancée to the movies and buys the popcorn; Lou chats up the diner owner because he cares; Lou makes eggs in a pan like everyone else, without a side of cheerleader liver. And suddenly, Lou calmly punches Jessica’s Alba’s face into ground chuck for four minutes while earnestly saying he loves her. That’s Lou, and the cool-affect Affleck has him right down to the slow grin and eyelid twitch. That’s the film you get, too—The Notebook-style romance, then Kate Hudson’s peeing herself from pain with a kicked-in spleen.
Don’t get me wrong—The Killer Inside Me has spoonfuls of raunch and the tension is needle sharp. But its purpose isn’t to satisfy standard appetites of the horror or thriller genre. It’s here to chill with Lou and get to really know him. Jessica Alba does a fine job as the central prop in Lou’s world—leaking pathos or shining with sensuality as needed—but we never get to know her outside the icon Lou makes her. The same goes with Kate Hudson, Simon Baker and Elias Koteas: They do great in their roles—nagging and nuzzling for Kate; canny investigator for Baker; menacing stuffed-shirt union boss for Elias. But they’re only roles—sophisticated performances but objectified by Lou and so by the story.
Objectification is a lot of what it’s about, though. For a similar reason, The Killer Inside Me has been criticized for gender inequality when it comes to violence. But that’s part of the point—Lou disposes of guys neatly and does in women with lusty punches because to do otherwise would be gay. He gets off on it, and the film’s disparity in how Lou dishes it out shows that as much as he lays out his reasoning like it was cold-blooded plotting, it really comes down to excuses for his sickness to feed. That can be very uncomfortable to see—especially since Lou coos and daydreams about his love interests with as much sincerity as he abuses them. Uncomfortable as it is, that’s how the wifebeaters and stalkers of the world operate.
Genre fans may find it difficult to get their jollies from The Killer Inside Me, as other films fail to compare. Lou’s too real to resemble your standard slasher story. Even zoom-shot serial killer flicks like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and American Psycho fall short from miring you in the psychopathic mind. Henry is too over-the-top and lacks a direct dialogue; American Psycho is social commentary. Both keep you at a remove. The Killer Inside Me is an unvarnished therapy session with some dude with a great haircut you might meet on Match.com.
So if you want to get to really know a sociopath, settle down with The Killer Inside Me and prepare to smell the blood, tears and shirt starch. See Lou fuss over his appearance. See him gaze into an amber Central Texas horizon as he waxes about cuddling and giggling with Jessica Alba. See him go from flowers and kisses to spitting and breaking bones in a split second. And see him act like he’s done no wrong. That’s The Killer Inside Me, and that’s what its subject, the workaday sociopath, is all about: That the predators prowl believing love and abuse to be one in the same.
