Nobody has it coming to them. That's why nobody can see it coming.
Michael Winterbottom's gritty neo-noir The Killer Inside Me had fairly toxic buzz coming out of Sundance last year, but I wanted to see it all the same and was disappointed when it never made it to Bloomington. (Story of my life, it seems.) Based on a novel by Jim Thompson which had previously been brought to the screen in 1976, the film stars Casey Affleck as a mild-mannered West Texas deputy sheriff whose laid-back personality hides the mind of, well, you can probably guess. "The trouble with growing up in a small town," he says, "is everybody thinks they know who you are." Clearly if his neighbors had taken the trouble to get to know him better, they would have realized there was something not quite right with him long before he started acting on his homicidal urges.
Most troubling to the Sundance audience was the violence in the film, particularly as it's visited upon the women (girlfriend Kate Hudson, prostitute Jessica Alba) who have the misfortune to get romantically involved with Affleck. I must admit I found it a little strong myself, but I'm not about to chide Winterbottom for being faithful to Thompson. The cast also features Ned Beatty as a powerful construction magnate, Tom Bower as the hard-drinking sheriff, Elias Koteas as the local union representative, Simon Baker as the district attorney who fingers Affleck right from the start but has a hard time pinning anything on him, and Bill Pullman as the man he eventually spills his guts out to. By the time he does he sure has plenty to spill.