thomas4cinema

Goddammit, what is it this week that drives me into the arms of some vicious filmmaking? Another movie that does not shy away from violence, but here depicted in a completely different context, without artistic or stylish or allegorical ambitions, but straightforward, as a tool to achieve a goal.

The main chracter here is somebody who wants to get ahead, and due to a complete lack of morality he does whatever is necessary in any given moment. Casey Affleck (I can now say by far my favourite of the Affleck dudes) plays this with a similarly eerie jolliness as in “The Assassination of Jesse James…” (I hope he can play anything else, or I withdraw my admiration heavy-heartedly…). He needs a girl dead, ideally beaten, so he beats her until she is dead. Later, he does the same in a socially much more terrible situation, but that first killing is what distracted many people who wrote reviews or comments from the rest of the film.

The murder is graphic and vicious, but I did not perceive it to be an irritant in the fabric of the whole film. It is shown where it is supposed to be shown and in the way it needs to be shown to understand what kind of person this guy is.

I admit I had some language issues – the dialect spoken stressed the seams of my language fabric and sometimes I just stared blankly at the screen, not clearly understanding why this development or that would benefit the Affleck character. …

For this reason or because the overall narration sagged a bit halfway through, I had some situations of slight lack of concentration, but we have here a new villain of cinema who can easily work his way into the pantheaon of legendary psychopoaths if enough people get to see the film.
See Roger Ebert’s thoughtful review.
The Killer Inside Me Movie Reviews, Pictures – Rotten Tomatoes.