Sundance 2010: The Killer Inside Me causes outrage!

Posted on Monday January 25, 2010, 09:54 by Damon Wise in Under The Radar

Oh. My. God. This blog was meant to be about The Runaways, in which Kristen Stewart plays Joan Jett and has a lesbian love scene with Dakota Fanning while crossing gender lines and snorting cocaine in a tragic-sweet biopic celebrating the life and times of the 70s all-girl rock band of the same name. That seemed a story enough... until the lights came up on Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 pulp novel in which a smalltown Texas cop becomes embroiled in a series of increasingly psychopathic murders. It began with an amazing retro credits sequence and ended with a woman, shaking with rage, asking why this film was chosen for the festival. In between, Winterbottom's latest provocation made Chris Morris's Four Lions seem quite mild in comparison, creating a compelling study of madness that had the audience gasping and the people behind me wondering aloud (in the way that everybody in Sundance wonders aloud) if the film would ever see the light of day in America.

I'll say up front that the film had some technical problems: the sound (or was it the acoustics?) seemed off, and star Casey Affleck's reedy voice frequently got lost in the mix. This made the film somewhat hard to follow, as it starts in a low-key, talky, noir fashion, with Affleck's Lou Ford being sent across town by his boss to send a local prostitute packing. He doesn't; instead, Ford embarks on a brutal S&M affair with her that suddenly turns dark in a way that will immediately raise hackles. I'd rather not go too much into plot, but they then plan a blackmail sting on a local business mogul, threatening to expose his seedy son if a ransom isn't paid. This is is the basic premise, and it sounds fairly standard, like the usual neo-noir stuff: it could be the Wachowski brothers' Bound, maybe, or one of John Dahl's films from when he was actually good.

But what's not very standard, however, is the violence. Though it is initially suggested rather than shown, in scenes that find Ford behaving more than a bit erratically, the cruelty in this film goes way beyond the endurance level of the average viewer. Blue Velvet this is not; there is no artful surrealism, just bleak, bloody and unjustifiable punishment, most of it (but not only) directed against women. And that's not all. Those women seem not just to endure it but to enjoy it, as much as they love the closed-off, sick, and sexually aberrant Ford – who, after all, is the person telling us this. The fact that these women are played by Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba only compounded the horror that seemed to ricochet around the auditorium, while the homely, hillbilly radio tunes on the score, plus Marcel Zyskind's pristine cinematography, put it all in a slick, plausible period setting.

I think I need to see the film again to know for sure how I feel about it, but twice after the lights came up I heard snarky audience members mention the words “American” and “Psycho”, each time in a tone of voice suggesting that this was nothing new. Well, Jim Thompson dealt in first-person wacko narratives well before Bret Easton Ellis, and – duh – in American Psycho, violence was a metaphor for the venal, self-serving economics of the United States in Ronald Reagan's wake. The Killer Inside Me, however, is about real violence, about real insanity, and the mental confusion that turns love upside down and destroys everything in its wake. I'm still not sure that I got it all, but from what I think I saw, I'm prepared to say that I think The Killer Inside Me, like Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, is an incredibly effectively and chilling exploration of mental breakdown, aided by a gripping central performance from Affleck as Ford, the killer on the road whose brain really IS squirming like a toad. Maybe if I see it again it might break the spell, but for now Winterbottom's film has followed me home and won't leave my brain alone. I'm far too old to be saying this, but I think The Killer Inside Me is badass. In all the best, right and wrong ways.