So Glad I Don't Have to See: The Killer Inside Me*

"The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask; like Michael Haneke, he is confronting the audience with the reality of sexual violence and abusive power relations between the sexes that cinema so often glamourises. Here, the movie is saying, here is the denied reality behind every seamy cop show, every sexed-up horror flick, every picturesque Jack the Ripper tourist attraction, every swooning film studies seminar on the Psycho shower scene." — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

I've never found the Art card really alters my experience of the movie that much. I get that it alters what you can say the movie is 'saying', but then that's always the least interesting bit of the moviegoing experience. And the experience in this case sounds viscerally unpleasant, whichever way you cut it. It's unpleasant to see a woman getting beaten to death. It's unpleasant when it's shot by a b-movie hack and it's unpleasant when it's shot by an Oscar winning auteur. It's unpleasant when the film is exploitative dreck and it's unpleasant when its artistic credentials are impeccable. I don't care.

*An occasional series devoted to those movies which make me pleased not to be trudging the critical treadmill any more; designed to illustrate the idea that we are all of us reviewing movies, all the time, even the ones we do not see.