Cast

Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas, Tom Bower, Simon Baker, Bill Pullman

Film description

After engaged documentaries and genre experiments, director Michael Winterbottom returns with an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel. A small-town deputy acts like the polite boy next door to cover up an explosive and dangerous temper that soon leads to tragedy. Even as the noose around him tightens, he manages to maintain the façade. Winterbottom masterfully stylizes a noir thriller showing violence bubbling beneath daily small talk, sweet country songs, and coffee ‘on the house’. Casey Affleck raises his game with subtle and ironic acting that catapults him into Hollywood’s top leading men and his character into the pantheon of those created by Tarantino, Stone, or the Coen borthers. Much like with the Coens work, the film offers a diagnosis of the American subconscious, where, as noted by Peter Bradshaw in ‘The Guardian’, [The film] 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.

Jan Topolski