There has been a star-studded history to the attempts to adapt Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp crime novel, The Killer Inside Me. Big names such as Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor to Tom Cruise, Drew Barrymore and Leonardo DiCaprio have been attached to it. Quentin Tarantino had it for a while, hoping Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman, and Juliette Lewis would star. A film was made in 1976, starring Stacy Keach, but is unseen by me (and by many others, it seems).Now we have Michael Winterbottom’s film of the book, starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, and Kate Hudson, and the problems that no doubt plagued the creative minds in the past are self evident here. The film looks great, wonderfully suggesting the sleepy, dusty world of a small west Texas town of the 1950s. But The Killer Inside Me is a tale narrated by a psychopath. What works on the page–a glimpse into the mind of a killer–on film seems like a so-what exercise.
Affleck is Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in Central City, Texas. He seems completely normal, and is sent on an errand by his boss to tell a prostitute (Alba) to get out of town. She responds by slapping his face, and this seems to be flip an on-switch in him. He tans her bare bottom with a belt, and they end up in a clinch (this film is nirvana for spanking enthusiasts). The affair goes on hot and heavy, despite Affleck’s relationship with his girlfriend, Hudson, and Alba’s relationship with the son of the town’s richest man.
Affleck learns that a beloved step-brother’s death may not have been an accident, and in order to get revenge on the man he believes responsible, that same rich man (Ned Beatty), he cooks up a plan to kill Beatty’s son by making it look like the son and Alba killed each other in a lover’s quarrel. Affleck first must kill Alba, and he does so in a shocking matter–pummeling her in the face. At first he gets away with it, but an inquisitive district attorney (Simon Baker) is suspicious of him, and Affleck needs to kill more people to keep his secret.
The film has other flaws. It’s heavy in exposition in the beginning, but even so there are numerous confusing moments. I was puzzled about some flashbacks to Affleck’s childhood and a woman who may have been his mother laying the foundation for his love of hitting women. Not helping is the sound mix, which has the dialogue recorded way too low, or Affleck’s mush-mouth Texas accent, which frequently required subtitles. It is almost calls for a second viewing just to get everything straight.
But how many will want to watch this film twice, let alone once? It is extremely unpleasant–the violence has already caused controversy. The assault on Alba is one of the most brutal I’ve seen in a long while, and it is not the only scene in the film that takes a long, clear-eyed view of a woman being savagely beaten. I’m sure misogyny was not intended, but this is not the movie to take a girl out on a date. It is to Alba and Hudson’s credit that they did this movie, as so often a movie with either of them signifies automatic crap, but I am curious as to Alba’s decision-making process. Did she read the script, realize that almost all of her part required her to be punched in the face or roll around in a state of semi-undress with Affleck and say to herself, “I must do this part!”
When it was over I had to wonder what the point was. Affleck, as movie psychopaths go, is not all that particularly interesting. I suspect the book is a much more gripping experience.
Gone Elsewhere 
Actually, I think this kind of is the point. The movie seemed to want to take a standard film noir plot (i.e., man and woman scheme to rip off rich guy and run away together), and then subvert that by making the guy a psychopath. And not a gleeful movie-type psychopath, but the kind of killer that we might find in real life, with a blank slate personality and unassuming presence.
Now that said, I don’t really feel the film was all that successful. Like you say, it’s well shot and acted, but it’s rather clunkily put together. I didn’t really understand the flashbacks either, and who the hell knows what that ending was about. There were characters that seemed completely unnecessary, like those played by Elias Koteas and Bill Pullman in a glorified cameo. And Lou’s plan never made the slightest amount of sense – it had no chance at working,for several obvious reasons. And since he’s a cop, even if just a small-town-Texas deputy, it’s especially confounding that he wouldn’t have seen those reasons.
But most of all, I think the plot was working against the portrayal of Affleck’s character. If you want to do the whole “banality of evil” thing, why give him such an obvious motive for his crimes? This guy isn’t really a serial killer in the usual sense of the term; every one of his crimes is a reaction to the one before it, and all are committed with self-preservation as his goal. He’s treated by the film as if he’s the a cross between Norman Bates and Alex from A Clockwork Orange, but he’s just not. He’s just a desperate idiot trying to clean up his own mess.
Hey everyone, the ending only happened in Lou Ford’s demented mind. Note the slide show in his prison cell. That was in his mind. The house didn’t go up in flames killing everyone. Ford created that and other scenes, only, in his delusional mind. The problem is trying to identify which things actually did happen and which things are strictly interior. Hell, I’m not sure, but you have to take into consideration that this intellectual mad man has the ability to imagine things that, to him, (and apparently to many viewers) seem real. Fact from fiction is often a tough distinction. In TKIM it’s nearly impossible.