It's rare that i'm so deeply affected by something that i'm virtually incapable of actually reacting to it for a while. stunned, in other words, is not something i'm familiar with. still, i was reminded of how this feels in a supremely visceral way yesterday afternoon when i watched The Killer Inside Me, a Michael Winterbottom film that's an adaptation of a Jim Thompson crime novel. It really took me until today to begin to understand how upset i was by it.
The film is an unquestionably disturbing noirish thriller centering on the character Lou Ford, a chirpy, unassuming small town deputy sheriff: a man seemingly preoccupied with being polite, gentlemanly and doling out inane platitudes and aphorisms, but whose run-in with a local prostitute (Jessica Alba) unearths repressed child molestation memories, subsequently unleashing sado-masochistic sexual desires and ultimately serial killer brutality. brutality which is mainly inflicted on women. ones he loves. this is where the problems lie for me.
Now, it has to be said, the performances are exceptional, even when what they are doing is virtually unwatchable. Casey Affleck's portrait of the deputy sheriff is the film's centrepiece: apparently so sweet and harmless he is in reality deeply, cruelly vile - Affleck pulls off nothing short of a coup, avoiding all serial killer cliches. Stanley Tucci in the abysmal The Lovely Bones should have ditched his comb over and NHS glasses and taken a lesson from his book. Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson as the virtual doppelganger good/bad girl lovers utterly convince with their blinded-by-love devotion, despite knowing the extent of the evil which is the object of their affection. the supporting cast of semi-curious small town oddballs manage to be both quirky individuals yet they never really make you shift your focus from the lead - which is pitch perfect as really it's all about him. his brazen, uncompromising, chillingly breezy brand of heinous, brutal savagery.
It's a fascinating portrait of a emergent serial killer, and it wasn’t the violence per se I had a problem with (though i found it unwatchable and spent a good deal of time hiding behind my fingers), but the sexualised nature of the violence. It seemed that there was a sexual nature to the brutality of the killing of the women (that you didn’t get with the men who were killed), in that there was a certain enjoyment in the killings, in sexual terms, which went beyond the actions/thoughts of the murderous character and transferred to the audience as a kind of sexual voyeurism. That I had a problem with. I rarely get up fired up about feminist things but I really found this aspect of the film so disturbing because it felt like a function of the direction, not simply the plot.
Had i read these articles before i went in, i might have been somewhat better prepared... though no less upset.
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