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What we desire is not a happy ending, so much as closure. That often means simply that a film knows what it thinks about itself. “The Killer Inside Me” is expert filmmaking based on a frightening performance, but it presents us with a character who remains a vast empty lonely cold space. The film finds resolution there somewhere, perhaps, but not on a frequency I can receive.
Michael Winterbottom s film is inspired by a 1952 pulp novel by Jim Thompson, perhaps the bleakest and most unrelenting of American crime novelists. The book is considered by some his finest work; other Thompson novels were filmed as The Grifters, The Getaway (1972), After Dark, My Sweet and Coup de Torchon. Stephen King wrote: “Big Jim didn t know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.”