Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) is a deputy sheriff in a small West Texan town, a ‘pretty boy with a badge’; the kind of upstanding young man that mothers dream about their daughters marrying as they drool over gingham tableclothes. Except Ford’s boyish charm hides the dark devices of a practising sadist and the eponymous killer inside. Stubbing a cigarette out on the hand of a drunk is just the beginning. Soon he and the local prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba), whom he has been assigned to run out of town, are in the throes of a sado-masochistic affair. His long-standing girlfriend Amy (Kate Hudson) isn’t averse to some vigorous spanking, either. Winterbottom’s greatest achievement in this film is to maintain a state of negative capability in the mind of the audience. Ford is the main protagonist and his actions are nauseating. There is no definite insight into why the women allow themselves to be treated in the way they are. One suggestion, as unpalatable as we may find it, is that some women act out of choice, and get turned on by ‘wrangling’ dangerous men. Joyce reads Ford from the moment he appears at her door and her slap is almost an invitation, one which Ford duly repays in more than kind. Nor does Amy seem to object to Ford thrashing her backside raw during lovemaking. There is no clear moral compass to guide us here. Lou’s own voice-over and flashbacks are as unreliable as the original narration in the source novel, Jim Thompson’s 1952 psychological noir thriller novel. The summary and shocking violence Ford metes out on two women he professes to love is all the more unsettling because the narrative – some of the dialogue in John Curran’s screenplay taken verbatim from Thompson’s novel – provides us with no clear explanation. Was Ford abused as a child? Does he just get off on being plain nasty, is he addicted to the ultimate power trip of taking another person’s life? This is not cartoon torture porn of the Saw or Hostel variety. This is an up-close and sustained realistic depiction of a man pounding a woman’s face to a bloody pulp and repeatedly kicking another woman lying helpless on the floor.

The Killer Inside Me exists in Blue Velvet territory, only in sepia tones and without the lurid colours of David Lynch’s hyperbolic brain. Indeed it is Winterbottom’s directorial brain rather than Ford’s we learn more about because  Affleck’s waxy charm as Ford is presented by actor and director as cool to the touch. Regarding the two female leads, Hudson’s Amy is a small town brunette with a penchant for naughtiness, while Alba’s glamorous blonde – perhaps too glamorous for such a backwater - light ups the stifling dun-coloured world. Both deliver fine performances. In the case of Alba, the casting is inspired. She carries so much blockbuster baggage with her that to see her treated as she ultimately is becomes shocking in itself. A cast of familiars such as Ned Beatty, Bill Pullman and The Mentalist himself, Simon Baker (playing an attorney on the trail of Ford) provide a strong cast of secondary characters.
 
Stanley Kubrick said of Ford’s portrayal in Thompson’s novel that it was: “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”. But perhaps because this is cinema and not first person literary narration I never felt that I was inside the mind of Lou Ford. And in fact I can bring to mind several credibly sick, twisted, predatory screen maniacs who have chilled me more, not least among them Al Littieri’s psychopathic Rudy Butler, from Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 adaptation of Thompson’s The Getaway.    

After the ennui of scenes shot in a sepia small-town world, the Grand Guignol climax feels like entering a parallel cinematic universe. Still, though by turns compelling and repellent, ultimately Winterbottom’s wilfully measured and dispassionate direction in The Killer Inside Me might just leave you cold rather than chilled.