Some time ago, I placed a personal moratorium on the use of the word “brutal” in my reviews. It’s a lazy adjective, so often overused, and used to such a generally hyperbolic effect that its real power has been diffused. But I’m bringing it out of the attic today. The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s classic crime novel, is a brutal piece of cinema, and it earns that descriptor more than a few times over.

In Killer, Winterbottom picked up a project that has fascinated actors and directors for decades. The list of people interested in making or starring in an adaptation is a long and star-studded one: Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt. A little seen (and apparently mediocre) version was successfully made in the 70s with Western director Burt Kennedy at the helm and Stacy Keach in the lead role taken on here by Casey Affleck.

And what a performance Affleck delivers in that lead role. As Lou Ford, a small-town Texas deputy sheriff with a frightening violent streak and secret psycho/sociopathic tendencies, Affleck must be both cold and unaffected in his demeanor towards the casual violence he engages in, yet also convey the deeply malevolent and disturbed mind behind that violence. There are similarities here between this Ford, and the one played by Affleck in the criminally underseen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (Coincidentally, the director of that film, Andrew Dominik, also wrote and nearly directed his own adaptation of The Killer Inside Me.) Both are hugely internal characters, and both are, in their own ways, cowards.