The Killer Inside Me, adapted from the 1952 Jim Thompson pulp novel of the same name by genre-hopping British director Michael Winterbottom is a film both stylish and shockingly brutal in equal measure.

Casey Affleck plays Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford and continues to impress as an actor by turning in his coldest performance yet. Dutifully tipping his hat to the town ladies yet happily stubbing his cigar out on a hobo’s hand, Ford is psychotic, and the film suggests a history of witnessing and participating in abuse though doesn’t attempt to excuse his behaviour for any of it. Affleck is a small, wiry man, but drips menace even when he’s on his best behaviour, and terrifies when he lets go.

Reminiscent of No Country for Old Men (particularly in Ford’s care not to get his shoes dirty) and Blood Simple though lacking both films’ humourous edge, The Killer Inside Me plays more like an updated Crime and Punishment, relocated to ’50s Texas with Ford as Raskolnikov, lazily trying to cover his tracks and casually murdering others in the process while the Petrovich role is split between a number of key players, from other law enforcement officers to union officials. A strong supporting cast, from Ned Beatty to Elias Koteas, tightens the net around him.

Raskolnikov killed accidentally then tried to morally justify his actions; Ford instead kills with purpose and method, but attempts no such justification. The idea that the police have some evidence against him, that there’s some key, revealing fact that he overlooked is a niggle at the back of his mind but it doesn’t ever drive him over the edge; he’s already there.

The Killer Inside Me has all the stylistic trappings and cinematography of most decent modern noirs, but the violence is most likely to be the most talked about aspect of the film; it is as difficult to watch as you may have heard. Limited to a few key scenes, it isn’t the fetishised, stylised brutality that we may be used to from our films, often played as much for laughs as for shock.

Instead, it is hard, unflinching and harrowing. Reminiscent of Gaspar Noé’s 2002 rape-revenge story Irréversible, this level of violence prevents the viewer from ever empathising with the perpetrator, and we can’t grant him the wise-cracking anti-hero role of, say, Lecter, or even Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. Though he narrates the film, we can’t get inside Ford’s head; as much as Ford smiles after the fact, we’re never smiling with him.