Winterbottom’s screen adaptation is not the first of The Killer Inside Me, which was filmed in 1976 by Burt Kennedy, with a screenplay by Edward Mann and Robert Chamblee which set the psycho-killer’s personal tale against the background of labour unrest at a local mine. Cinematography by Winterbottom mainstay Marcel Zyskind takes us back to the 1950s with the precision Ford applies to his own life. Production design by Rob Simons and Mark Tildesley recreates meticulously a sedate western city, down to the details of the fastidious killer’s clothing. Thompson’s novel is mostly dialogue and interior monologue, so an adaptation has flexibility in its depiction of Ford’s town. Ford’s chilling arrogance gives ominous substance to the overworn term “coldblooded”. In his penchant for talking with seeming authority about almost anything, he is reminiscent of real killers such as Ted Bundy.
Impassive, but more violent than Chigurh, the killer in No Country For Old Men, Affleck’s Ford is also far more cerebral than American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. His motivation in killing seeps through over the course of the film, but far more time is devoted to his attacks on two women than to the reasons why he targets them. He eventually bludgeons Joyce and shoots the local mayor’s son, leaving the murder weapon in Joyce’s hand.Ĭasey Affleck plays Ford as a boy scout who graduated to the police force with an eerily high voice and a rigidity that seems inscrutable. She receives a beating after she slaps Ford, who has been sent to close down her house, and then becomes his lover. Ford is imperturbable, except when provoked, as we see in an encounter with local prostitute Joyce (Alba). The killer in Winterbottom’s first American film is (and is in) Sheriff’s Deputy Lou Ford (Affleck), the son of respectable parents in Central City, Texas.
Theatrical response should be similar to Antichrist, another film whose violence is at the extreme end of what is watchable. Anyone releasing it will be dogged by its violence, especially towards women. Winterbottom will prove them wrong.ĭistributors who hop on board – IFC Films was an early taker after Killer’s premiere at Sundance - will be shy in their expectations of this film, since most audiences will be shy about its brutality, despite Winterbottom’s established reputation. It is hard to watch - and for some will be impossible - regardless of any psychological logic behind its many killings.Īudiences up to their ears in serial killers may enter this film, thinking they already know them all. Michael Winterbottom’s staggeringly violent adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me reaches a new extreme in the cinematic depiction of a psychopathic murderer.
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