MOVIE REVIEW

"No one has it coming," says the protagonist of "The Killer Inside Me," and "That's why no one can see it coming." That nihilistic vision of a meaninglessly vicious universe is the backdrop to Michael Winterbottom's film version of the 1952 pulp novel by Jim Thompson. Casey Affleck chillingly plays deputy sheriff Lou Ford, a quiet, polite young man in a small West Texas town who is a sadist and a psychopath.

In Winterbottom's presentation, Ford is not a split personality or a Jekyll and Hyde character, those favorite movie types. Rather, he is both polite and brutal, gentlemanly and sadistic at the same time. He apologizes when he kills, murmurs endearments as he tortures, and seems totally sincere. Affleck has the boyish good looks and the calm, contained, almost blank quality needed to make his Lou Ford totally plausible.

With David Lynch-like faithfulness to detail, Winterbottom creates the idyllic 1950s small town where "everyone thinks they know who you are," as Ford notes in his bland voice-over narration.

There Ford, the educated son of the town doctor, is a protégé of the alcoholic sheriff. Sent out to encourage the local prostitute to move on, he falls into a sadomasochistic love affair with Joyce, played by a kittenish Jessica Alba, who soon suggests they run a con on the town's big shot, Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), whose son is one of her devoted clients. Ford has his own reasons for wanting to punish Chester and he comes up with another plan, one that differs from Joyce‘s in a significant detail.

The convoluted plot, which hinges on old grudges and graft, is hard to follow and often feels contrived, perhaps due to its pulp provenance. Things happen because the writer/director need them to happen, not because human beings in those situations would necessarily do those things. But it's unlikely that anyone will come to see "A Killer Inside Me" for the plot; rather, they'll come — or avoid the film — for the astonishingly depraved violence and misogyny. Its appearance at Sundance in January caused one outraged woman in the audience to attack Winterbottom verbally at the talkback, and there's been a lot of subsequent chatter on the Internet.

This is one of the most woman-hating movies I've ever seen, and the time and attention Winterbottom's camera devotes to the beatings that Ford inflicts on the two women in the film left me feeling numb. It must take a full five minutes for Ford to punch and kick Joyce to her end, and we see every blow. Kate Hudson, who gives a wonderfully realized performance as Ford's trashy but respectable girlfriend Amy, is brutalized in turn.

Ford is a serial killer, but interestingly his male victims are dispatched neatly with a shot to the head or they die off screen. Only the women are tormented in front of the camera, so one has to ask, Why? What's Winterbottom's point? Yes, Ford is a sexual sadist, but that's made clear in those bedroom scenes. What more do we learn about him by watching him brutalize the two women at length? Nothing, which brings this film very close to pornography.