Lou Ford is a complicated man. In addition to being a sheriff in a small, oil rich Texas town he’s also a sexually tortured psychopathic killer. Channelling his work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with hints of Travis Bickle and Down in the Valley’s Harlan, Casey Affleck produces an memorising performance as The Killer Inside Me’s protagonist. Over the space of three films (Jesse James, Gone, Baby Gone and now The Killer Inside Me) Affleck is increasingly proving himself to be one of America’s finest actors.
Here, Affleck must convey the external and internal emotions of man who is trusted by his fellow Texans while repressing a childhood of sexual deviancy and hiding a murderous present. This is achieved with what appears to be remarkable ease, although surely it isn’t. Affleck’s preternatural ingenuousness on film brings with it his skill in conveying an active mind behind calm, unnerving eyes. Psychopathic, sexually deviant killers are hard to indentify with; normal rules that apply to almost the entire population disappear in the presence of a warped mind. Yet, Ford is completely relatable; his sense of entitlement, developed through a hidden intelligence he feels uncomfortable revealing is a relatable frustration. As is the mollifying manner that other residents treat him with. Therefore Lou Ford becomes as real and as memorable as Robert Ford and the far more contemporary Patrick Kenzie. The reality of the performance (complimented by Winterbottom’s direction) makes the character all the more terrifying. Therefore, rather than the violence (which is shocking in its suddenness) becoming the focal point of the film it instead evolves as another disturbing layer of Lou Ford.
In less competent hands The Killer Inside Me could have become a misogynistic, exploitative experience, but with the skill behind and in front of the camera, it is instead an engrossing, ontological study of an unbalanced mind.
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