The Killer Inside Me

In a small oil town in west Texas during the 1950s, Lou Ford works as a deputy sheriff. He is polite, unhurried and well liked, and people take him for a slightly dull but harmless man. Underneath that surface he carries what he calls a sickness: a violent, sadistic side he keeps hidden from everyone around him. When he is sent to deal with Joyce Lakeland, a prostitute involved with the son of the area's most powerful businessman, the encounter stirs that buried part of him.

The Killer Inside Me is a 2010 crime drama directed by Michael Winterbottom, who wrote the screenplay with John Curran. It adapts Jim Thompson's 1952 novel of the same name. Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, with Kate Hudson as Amy Stanton, Jessica Alba as Joyce Lakeland, Ned Beatty as Chester Conway, Tom Bower as Sheriff Bob Maples and Simon Baker as Howard Hendricks. The film was made for about 13 million dollars and took roughly 4 million dollars worldwide. It is the ninth of fifteen features Winterbottom has directed, coming after A Mighty Heart and before Trishna.

Audience response has been modest: on IMDb it holds 6.1 out of 10 from around 37,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 5.8 out of 10 from about 650 votes. A critics' rating of 6 out of 10, drawn from 126 reviews, places professional assessment slightly above the audience scores on both platforms.