FROM THE KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL:

Two killers

4. 7. 2010 / Ema Čulík

Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me is based on the 1952 novel of the same name by Jim Thompson, where the killer recounts in first person his view of the people around him, their reactions to him, or rather, how he perceives them. In this film Winterbottom attempts to translate the effect of prose's subjective narrator onto the screen, where inevitably the viewer believes what is put in front of him unless he is told not to. The only problem with this film is that the inconsistency between what we see along with the protagonist and what the rest of his world sees is not made explicit enough. Perhaps it is a good thing that Winterbottom works with his material subtly, as the closeness to his Officer Lou Ford allows the spectator to follow his actions from a psychological point of view. We see that he has no particular motives, that he is driven by the sexual aspects of his relationships with women and then their murders. But we see these thought processes appear in him naturally, they are not forced out by amateur psychological questioning.

However, this film is a little too subtle in its psychology to let through the idea that Winterbottom was ultimately trying to portray. The disparity between Lou's viewpoint and reality is supposed to be that he beats them viciously for his own sexual pleasure and he believes that they, too, are enjoying it and asking for more, and not only that, are besotted with him to the end no matter what he might do to them. Arguably, the barbarous violence that he inflicts on people should be sign enough that this situation is unrealistic. He beats a woman's face to a pulp, her nose is flattened, a huge gash in the side of her mouth, she is barely recognisable.. and yet, she uses her last breath to half-pronounce "I love you".

Later we are told that she didn't wake from her anaesthetic, and then at the end of the film she appears again, scarred and barely walking, having come to him to say that she loves him. This is a discrepancy that could very easily be missed, but if it is noticed, it very clearly shows that the account of events we are given is not to be trusted. Winterbottom is playing with the technique of unreliable narrator which usually is a difficult thing to reproduce in cinema. This is obviously a film that has to be watched more than once in order to be appreciated fully.

The other serial killer film of today does not need re-watching to be understood. It is blatant, straightforward and extremely heavy-handed. Julius Ševčík's film Normal, Tale of the Dusseldorf Ripper (based on the 1991 play of the same name by Anthony Neilson ) leaves the audience in absolutely no doubt as to what its message is. Peter Kurten, the eponymous Dusseldorf Ripper, is on trial for numerous bloodthirsty murders committed over the space of several years. He is assigned an enthusiastic young (just turned 30!) lawyer to defend him and to prove that he is mentally ill and thus entitled to serve out the rest of his days in a mental asylum rather than be executed. Over his long 'psychological' interviews with his client, young Justus's altruistic intentions become corrupted by Kurten's questions, by the lack of that professionalism which he had insisted on having at the beginning of the film and the bright lights and smoky bars of Germany in 1930.

He is driven to sex with a remarkably plain prostitute and even beats up the father of Kurten's first victim (a young girl, whom he first strangled, then stabbed, and finally raped). As Justus is pounding the shit out of this poor mourning father, we are probably supposed to think, "oh dear, look what the world around him has driven him to" but a rather more likely reaction to this development is sheer astonishment and confusion at such behaviour unfounded by his character or the situation. At the end of the film the 30-year-old teenager fails to convince the bloodthirsty crowd not to execute his client, and we are told that the murderer was declared to be not only not insane, but downright "normal".

Then we are told that over the next few years German citizens did a whole lot more other unthinkable things, even though they, too, were apparently 'normal'. It's not difficult to deduce from all this what the director was trying to say. A society which is under stress can act out and sentence a serial killer to murder. It would be far wiser to lock him away. Otherwise we can become murderers too. In this film there is more or less a direct connection between the fact that German society sentenced a serial-killer to death in 1930 and then three years later elected Hitler as the head of their society. In general the film suffers from a certain sentimental law of causality which reminds me a lot of the style of music videos for contempoary emo (short for EMOtional) rock music. (EG: HERE )There, too, there is a raven-black haired and -eyed youth who stands around with a look of bewilderment on his face, has very earnest intentions and acts rashly, not understanding much that is going on around him. Furthermore, the emo-video (which is so characteristically insincere that it's almost a genre in its own right) almost always suffers from a serious overdose of filters and stylisation.

This film opens in turquoise and purple colours for no apparent reason, maybe about 60% of the film is shot in short focus with glittering bokeh decorating the background. This film is shot in entirely grey-blue-black shades, which was so fashionable and subsequently overused in 1997-98 that no one has dared use such colour palettes since, unless it firmly justified by the meaning of the film. Normal revels in its stylisation, distorting anything possible with 'artistic' techniques which seem to serve no concept than just for the sake of it. If the lawyer is entering a building, we either see him in the reflection of a car, or he is surrounded by the aforementioned glitters, or he exits the building and looks up to the sky dramatically.

When Kurten's wife finds out about all his murders, we see the faces of all the women he killed projected onto the skin of her body. This was all very pretty but not really justified by the situation at hand. Apart from this, there was a sprinkling of very familiar clichés, such as wind billowing through curtains and extinguishing a candle in front of ceramic dolls, and Kurten's arrest: he sits in a church on the first pew, soldiers run in from all sides pointing rifles at him. We never see his face, the camera stays close to the soldiers or looks down at the scene from the choir stalls above. When Kurten finally rises the camera stays directly behind his head, his hands slowly rising up. Finally, I wonder if it's just a coincidence that Ševčík's Kurten (played by Milan Knazko) bears an uncanny likeness in appearance and demeanour to Jonathan Demme's Hannibal Lector as played by Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs, 1991).

In comparison with Casey Affleck's thoughtful and considered portrayal of Lou Ford, this murderer seems like a parody of himself, and hardly a moral milestone (albeit marking off evil). This film's characters, treatment (narrating the story through the prism of the lawyer, a fictional addition to the story which was otherwise based entirely on real events), appearance and imagery are all quite over the top and unconvincing and if not for the tragic soundtrack one would think to laugh. Winterbottom's film, however, is not over the top, and rather the opposite. For that reason it was far more interesting to watch, but it also failed to make obvious what it was treating, and seemed almost like another American murder tale.

Vytisknout