Casey Affleck is Lou Ford, a small-town deputy sheriff ordered to evict local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba) for taking up with the son of a prominent businessman. It only takes one encounter with the seductive Joyce for Ford to get swept up in an intense sexual affair with her, and soon he's hatching a scheme to blackmail her lover so they can run away together. But behind Ford's accommodating Texan smile hides a cold-blooded killer, and when his upstanding fiancée (Kate Hudson) catches wind of the infidelity and the whole town begins asking questions, Ford's attempts to cover his tracks snowball in escalating acts of deception and violence.

Adapting from cult pulp author Jim Thomson's novel, BAFTA Award-winning director Michael Winterbottom crafts a classic film noir with an insidious twist. A hard-boiled crime story becomes a subversive psychological exercise in identification, as Ford's continuous first-person narration increasingly implicates the viewer in his brutal violence. Anchored by an unsettling performance from Affleck, transitioning with unnerving ease between charismatic good ol' boy and savage sociopath, The Killer Inside Me is a chillingly intimate portrait of moral bankruptcy and the criminal mind.

Michael Winterbottom