The Killer Inside Me

Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Bill Pullman. Elias Koteas, Ned Beatty, Simon Baker 18 cert, lim release, 109 min

The squeamish are urged to avoid this gripping portrait of insanity, writes DONALD CLARKE

IT SEEMS strange to ask whether a treatment of work by the grim reaper of 20th century pulp – all incest and punctured gonads – should make us feel slightly revolted. If a Jim Thompson adaptation doesn't turn the stomach then it has, surely, failed in its duty. Certain scenes in Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, closely adapted from a 1952 Thompson novel, have, however, caused rotten fruit to be thrown from the press seats.

It’s reasonable to ask the question. The makers of Sex and the City get attacked for allowing their charges to indulge in promiscuous retail blitzkriegs. Meanwhile, Winterbottom gets

(for the most part) strong reviews for a film in which a deranged cop is shown slowly hammering his girlfriend’s face into pulpy, bone-flecked debris.

The key word here, of course, is "empathy". Whereas the SATCcrowd are being invited to live vicariously through the ghastly covetousness of the film's heroines, Winterbottom expects his audience to be revolted by the explicit slayings. It seems to have worked. Thompson would, surely, have savoured the irony in those outraged calls for the director to make his killings a little less unpleasant.

As was the case with Michael Winterbottom's hopeless 9 Songs, the raging controversy has distracted from considerations of the film's quality. Well, it's not the best Thompson adaptation ever (Stephen Frears's The Griftersstill holds that title) but it remains a properly gruelling journey through the brain of a psychopath. Nobody who is even slightly (I mean even the teeniest, tiniest bit) squeamish about cinema violence should go anywhere near The Killer Inside Me. Robust punters will, however, find their skulls shaken and their spines chilled.

Eerily boyish and creepily courteous, Casey Affleck stars as Lou Ford, a Texan law officer who, though engaged to a loving local girl (competent Kate Hudson), enjoys a sadomasochistic relationship with a newly arrived prostitute (equally competent Jessica Alba). In the course of plotting a scam against a local businessmen, Lou beats his lover into bloody oblivion.

To this point, the ghastly protagonist has seemed little more than a particularly ruthless criminal, but, as events progress and his behaviour turns ever stranger, it becomes clear that he is a fully fledged delusional maniac.

Certain tired clichés of the malevolent genius (fresher, perhaps, in 1952) are given yet one more airing. When Lou is not listening to classical music, he is reading Freud or solving differential equations. Affleck manages, however, to

inject believability into the role by stripping his performance of any affectations or decorations. That old chestnut about the banality of evil is summoned up in a numbing collage of blank stares, dull shrugs and muttered consonants.

Ah yes, the muttering. Winterbottom has, we must assume, encouraged his cast to emulate the lazy diction of some particular corner of rural Texas. Verisimilitude’s happy gain is, however, lucidity’s unfortunate loss. Virtually one in every third word is lost to the wind.

The Killer Inside Meis also somewhat compromised in its location work and set-direction. Featuring weirdly underpopulated streets filmed in conspicuously tight shots, the finished movie fails to effectively distract from its budgetary compromises. The viewer is always aware that, should the camera move a centimetre to the right, he or she would surely discover sneakered youths operating iPads outside Starbucks.

Still, for all its flaws, The Killer Inside Medoes a good job of working its way under your skin and adding unease to the rest of your week. Whether or not that's an effect the reader will savour is something only he or she knows. This is a nasty piece of work, but that's as it should be.