Casey Affleck & Kate Hudson

The trick, as G. Gordon Liddy once said, is not minding. All too often at the movies we witness the worst sort of violence, the most palatable sadism a screenwriter can concoct in the name of a good time. Yet it's rarely meant to disturb beyond a momentary wince.

Strange, then, to encounter a film such as "The Killer Inside Me," which really makes the audience eat it. This adaptation of the memorably rancid 1952 Jim Thompson novel features, among other things, a notorious scene between Casey Affleck, who plays the deputy sheriff of a West Texas town, and Jessica Alba, his fellow sadomasochist and prostitute lover, who's a tramp like all the other women in his twisted life.

The assault dramatizes the following sentences from the novel: "I backed her up against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once." Horrible. And yet the punishment this scene inflicts does what other adaptations of Thompson novels have rarely done: It goes as far as it should, which, given the source material, is very far indeed.

Yet director Michael Winterbottom's film lacks some essential element, an insidious momentum along with a sure sense of narrative. No complaints with Affleck: He holds the screen. As Lou Ford, the young lawman whose soul is locked in solitary confinement, the actor uses his shark's eyes and quavery, sandpapery voice to embody Boy Scout one minute, depravity the next. He's a chilling presence, a charismatic worm. And if we have to struggle to understand some of his voice-over readings, it's a small price to pay. The movie surrounding him is far more conventional. Winterbottom and adapter John Curran struggle to make sense of the various backstories regarding Lou, his psychosexual demons, and the chumps surrounding his stifling life out by all the oil wells and cattle. It's not the typical noir: Winterbottom was right to keep the light and compositions flat and bright and eerily sunny, no matter what sort of evilness Lou perpetrates. But the story should grow progressively more reckless-seeming and feverish; instead, it is methodical to a fault.

Stephen Frears' "The Grifters" remains the most successful Thompson adaptation on screen, though Thompson himself contributed marvelous work on Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" and "Paths of Glory."

Beyond Affleck's, the performances here lack amplitude and dramatic impact. And while Winterbottom has done some fine work lately, from "Tristram Shandy" to "A Mighty Heart," with this material he's approximating a style instead of inhabiting it.

 

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"The Killer Inside Me" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: R (for disturbing brutal violence, aberrant sexual content and some graphic nudity).

Running time: 1:49.

Cast: Casey Affleck (Lou Ford); Kate Hudson (Amy Stanton); Jessica Alba (Joyce Lakeland); Ned Beatty (Chester Conway); Elias Koteas (Joe Rothman); Simon Baker (Howard Hendricks).

Credits: Directed by Michael Winterbottom; written by John Curran, based on the novel by Jim Thompson; produced by Chris Hanley, Bradford L. Schlei and Andrew Eaton. An IFC Films release.