The Killer Inside Me is a deeply unpleasant movie which is  hard to watch and impossible to enjoy.

Michael Winterbottom’s film is based on the 1952 crime noir novel by Jim Thompson and a remake of a badly received 1976 movie of the same name.

It  is the squalid tale of Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) a small-town cop and unrepentant killer. His love of classical music and clean cut exterior is sharply at odds with the dark sadistic nature within.

Affleck’s mumbled drawl is so pronounced that many of his lines are as incomprehensible as his actions.

He knows he’s mentally sick but just can’t help himself. Being a young witness to the beatings his mother was (apparently willingly) subjected to makes him numb to the suffering he causes others.

Spade Cooley’s country swing number ‘Shame On You’ is used as a kind of ironic signature tune but his calculated cruelty goes way beyond being merely shameful.

His colleagues are not the brightest bunch so he even gets away with killing a man while visiting him in a prison cell (they think it was suicide…doh!).

I haven’t read the novel but it is no surprise to learn that was written as a first person narrative, with Thompson attempting to unravel what goes on in the mind of a sadistic killer.

Winterbottom’s unimaginative way of translating this inner monologue into a cinematic language is to use the dull device of having a voiceover from start to finish.

The crude portrayal of  brutal maltreatment of women shows a sickness and depravity that sadly is not confined to the world of fiction. These graphic images are genuinely shocking and, even more controversially, the women appear to get pleasure the rough treatment he dishes out. Little is left to the imagination to the extent that the scenes border on the misogynistic even though what we see is, I suppose,  meant to disturb rather than titillate (unless you’re as sick in the head as Lou).

Somehow you expect a reputable filmmaker like Winterbottom to draw some moral purpose from this dark tale but instead all we get is a nihilistic vision of masculinity that is as chillingly cold-blooded  as the protagonist.

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