The Killer Inside Me (2010)
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small west Texas town, patient and apparently thoughtful. Some people think he is a little slow and maybe boring, but that is the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows about what Lou calls his "sickness": He is a brilliant, but disturbed sociopathic sadist.
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He is close in spirit to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who looked in the mirror and declared that he is “not there.”
Not unlike Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or American Psycho , The Killer Inside Me is a violent film because it’s about a violent person.
Since the character's mocking of his fellow citizens of Central City with deadpan aphorisms like "Haste makes waste"—bullshitting the rubes—could endear him to some indie-film viewers on the coasts, a more distanced rendering of his crimes could result in one more cool American Psycho–style antihero.
No insight, no irony and no echoes of Peckinpah, De Palma or Tarantino whistle across these Texas plains; "No Country for Old Men" brutal artistry either.
I found it hard not to think of No Country for Old Men - and surely that film's success helped to goose the Thompson adaptation out of its decade-long stay in Development Hell - where the Coen brothers found a way to visually depict the particularly apocalyptic, almost mythological quality of Cormac McCarthy's writing; Winterbottom literalises Thompson, but does not capture his essence, does not make the film as grueling and intense an experience as the man's writing was.
In The Killer Inside Me, Casey Affleck secures himself a place in the annals of menacing, memorable celluloid bad guys, giving Hannibal Lecter and No Country for Old Men’s cattle stun gun toting Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) a run for their money.
It is best described as a ‘country noir,’ resembling films like Lone Star and especially No Country For Old Men for its brutal existentialism.
As a determined attempt to make a psychopath the least bit interesting, it's in a league with "No Country for Old Men," which for all its popularity and Oscar glory, was still monotonously cruel and shallow.
You might argue that he’s a fan of chaos, like The Dark Knight’s Joker or No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, but even that theory is iffy.
By making the violence in The Killer Inside Me so revolting and unpalatable, Winterbottom confronts us with our own tendency to become complicit with onscreen violence, in a way that is not too dissimilar to Gaspar Noé Irréversible and both versions of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games .
Even the much talked about two scenes of shocking violence won't be that traumatic for anyone who's seen Gaspar Noe's "Irreversible."
Eclectic director Michael Winterbottom has done everything from adapting British literature ("Jude," "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story") to making political docudramas ("Welcome to Sarajevo," "In This World," "A Mighty Heart") to commenting on the British music scene ("24 Hour Party People," "9 Songs").
Winterbottom, whose infamous “9 Songs” featured its stars actually having sex on camera, seems a little too eager to provoke.
Winterbottom is a born experimenter, and he has always been interested in putting as much “truth’’ on the screen as possible — in 2004’s “9 Songs’’ he tried to tell a love story with actual sex.