Winterbottom’s tough adaptation of Jim Thompson’s highly rated 1952 crime novel sent shockwaves through this year’s Berlin Film Festival with its graphic depiction of violence and amorality.
This is a fascinating, psychologically complex and brutally unflinching gaze into the mind of Casey Affleck’s superbly creepy small town killer.
With a starry cast used in a deeply unglamorous assault on our psyches, this ranks with Winterbottom’s best work.
This is No Country For Old Men’s twisted little brother and packs a real emotional punch.
A key release on the summer calendar, and sure to stir up considerable controversy, it’s a film which invites us to peer into a deeply troubled soul who stares unblinkingly right back at us asking some big and perhaps unanswerable questions about the things damaged people do to both themselves and others on the road to self-destruction.
While it’s undoubtedly one of the more viscerally explicit films of recent years, it is very different to the voyeuristic unmotivated violence against women seen in, say, Quentin Tarantino’s films. Rather than being another violent piece of emotionally arrested misanthropy, it is a film which begs the question ‘why do these things happen?’. But be warned, it doesn’t give any easy answers.