Killer inside me

It's nice when a small mainstream film gets a big break. The Killer Inside Me may, as lead actor Casey Affleck's latest chance to savour a taste of older brother Ben's bigger success in Hollywood. Casey's being touted as an outside chance for a Best Actor Oscar nomination in 2011. He has been an outsider once before, for Best Supporting Actor in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His other major claim to fame has been three appearances in the ensemble casts for the Oceans franchise.

This time, he's an arch anti-hero in a frighteningly noir Western thriller directed with icy precision by Michael Winterbottom. The Briton's films vary wildly but are rarely easy viewing (e.g. Mighty Heart, Road to Guantanamo, Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs). This one's far from easy; psychotic multiple killers are tricky characters to portray entertainingly. One of the few to succeed was Mary Harron's American Psycho (Christian Bale's breakthrough movie as an adult actor), and Winterbottom's movie lacks that film's air of fantasy. It helped audiences not to take the coldly brutal character of Bale's killer at face value. Instead Winterbottom and Affleck compel us to look straight into the calm smiling eyes of a baby-faced soft-voiced sadist.

This remake of a 1950s Jim Thompson pulp fiction reportedly is truer to the novelist's original story. It's a complex one, filled with socially flawed characters. Affleck is Ford, an orphan Texan policeman whose boss (Tom Bower) is an alcoholic. The death of Ford's adopted brother had been set up by the town's property kingpin (Ned Beatty), whose son (Jay Ferguson) is besotted by a local prostitute (Jessica Alba). The policeman has a girlfriend (Kate Hudson), and the scenario also involves an interfering union organiser (Elias Koteas), a suspicious outside detective (Simon Baker), a blackmailer, and a cafe owner and his teenage son. Most of them will need to die once the policeman starts arranging justice and death to suit his moods. Inevitably, amid such complexity there are squeaky plot devices, but the movie gallops past them.

Thompson, briefly a member of the US Communist Party, was a victim of the McCarthy era, and also one of egocentric Stanley Kubrik's credit-deprived co-writers (for Paths of Glory and The Killing). Other Thompson stories adapted later by Hollywood included Stephen Frears' The Grifters and Roger Donaldson's The Getaway, while French directors brought him belated recognition too with Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon and Alain Corneau's Serie noire. Winterbottom has now highlighted the recurrent noir nastiness in Thompson's work, and many US critics fixated on what they saw as the excessive violence Affleck's character inflicts on his female victims.

Are the fast-cut scenes of facial and bodily battering necessary for a fuller understanding of the killer's mind? To me, yes, in the context of the whole killing sequence. They made the killer's fastidious footsteps, calm pause to glance at a newspaper, toying with a coffee maker and other psychotic mannerisms even more horrifyingly disconnected from his twisted sense of reality. At the end, when an audience might be expecting suicidal redemption, there's a Grand Guignol finale that will ensure the movie's fame/notoriety as a classic noir thriller.

[Meanwhile, Casey was notching up a bigger marker in 2010. His creative direction of the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary I'm Still Here also got him noticed favourably. Phoenix, a brother-in-law and good friend of Affleck, got noticed anew too.]