The Killer Inside Me

Casey Affleck grins like a death's head with the flesh reattached in this noir thriller from British director Michael Winterbottom, which is sickeningly violent but undoubtedly well made. It has been widely condemned for the scenes in which women are brutally assaulted and for many, this film will be just hardcore misogynist hate-porn with a fancy wrapper, and those who admire it, or tolerate it, are merely the women-haters' useful idiots. My own view is that this is a seriously intentioned movie, which addresses and confronts the question of male hate and male violence in the form of a nightmare. Of this, more in a moment.

The Killer Inside Me is adapted from the pulp thriller by Jim Thompson, and Affleck plays the chillingly sociopathic Lou Ford, who happens to be the deputy sheriff in a small Texas town in the 1950s. It's a place where, as Lou puts it in one of his drawling voiceovers, everyone thinks they know you, just because they have grown up with you.

Lou is a well-spoken young man, and a high-functioning career professional, fluent in the mannerisms of old-school Texas politesse, never neglecting to touch his Stetson as he passes a lady on the street. He is engaged to a local girl, Amy Stanton, played by Kate Hudson, but is carrying on an obsessive affair with a prostitute, played by Jessica Alba, and surrenders to the ecstatic love of violence this affair has unlocked within him. Lou has a sadistic taste for rough sex, evidently implanted by a troubled family background – a taste that is the prelude to a horrific, explicit succession of assaults. Lou rationalises these as the means by which he can pursue his plots and grudges, but clearly it is an addiction beyond his control or understanding.

Winterbottom conjures up the era and locale of 1950s Texas, and creates a film observantly derived from Hitchcock's Psycho and Capote's In Cold Blood, and perhaps the Coens' Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men, with touches of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Winterbottom ratchets up the fear and the intimate unease with shrewdly chosen classic country numbers in the Hank Williams vein on the soundtrack – especially in the scene in which Lou goes on an aeroplane trip to Fort Worth. These are keening melodies of male self-pity that promise a terrible denouement.

Be warned: this really is a very violent movie, the like of which I haven't experienced since Gaspar Noé's legendary 2002 film Irréversible, and for me, extreme violence is difficult and oppressive. Winterbottom consciously turns the provocation dial up to 11, to 12, to 13 and beyond by making the victim actually appear to be grateful and submissive. As if to turn the screw again and again, the film devises a scenario in which violence is meted out against a victim who is in some sense a consenting partner, and whose submissive love survives even after the full horror is disclosed. My view is that Winterbottom has consciously taken to extremes a situation that other types of drama would evasively sentimentalise. The film put me in mind of Nancy's notorious song from the musical Oliver! "As long as he needs me…" sings Nancy – that is to say, as long as I am sure that Bill Sikes needs me, and loves me, then it is all right for him to beat me up. This song concluded every episode of the BBC TV reality show designed to cast Oliver, without any indication of what it was actually implying.

There can be no doubt that Lou is loathsome, or that the still uncorrupted forces of law and order are visibly committed to his apprehension, but this is, I think, not exactly the point of Winterbottom's film. The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask; like Michael Haneke, he is confronting the audience with the reality of sexual violence and abusive power relations between the sexes that cinema so often glamourises. Here, the movie is saying, here is the denied reality behind every seamy cop show, every sexed-up horror flick, every picturesque Jack the Ripper tourist attraction, every swooning film studies seminar on the Psycho shower scene. Here. This is what we are actually talking about.

I have seen films that really are insidiously misogynistic in a way The Killer Inside Me is not, films that make light of the denigration of women, and I should also say that this film does crucially show the consequences of violence, a responsibility shirked by what I call the "arthouse rape" genre, in which dreamy, languid movies are finally topped off with a flourish of sexual violence, just before the credits, without a smidgen of curiosity about what happens to the victim afterwards.

Lou's chilling MO is summed up by his visit to a troubled young guy in a police cell, a young man who has guessed Lou's awful secret and wheedlingly asks if the victim "had it coming". Lou replies: "Nobody has it coming. That's why nobody can see it coming." It is a haiku of despair to be compared and contrasted with Gene Hackman's gunfighter in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven being told that he'd just assaulted an "innocent" man – Hackman snarls: "Innocent? Innocent of what?" Lou Ford is a poison cloud of violence infecting everything around him: this is a film with a carbon-core of horror and pessimism at its heart.