By Jay A. Fernandez

alba SUNDANCE: Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson beaten by The Killer Inside Me Let’s get this out of the way up front: In Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me,” Jessica Alba is pulverized, fist to face, fist to face, fist to poor pretty face, by Casey Affleck for a good three minutes or so. Until her eyes are swollen shut and part of her face has been smashed away, exposing her jaw. What one character later describes as “hamburger,” “stewed meat.”

It’s ultra-real, excruciating to watch and, in some viewers’ minds, inexcusable.

When Affleck’s sociopathic deputy sheriff, Lou Ford, does something similar to Kate Hudson’s character later in the nihilistic noir, Winterbottom and crew lost even more of the audience. Not that they walked out of the night-time premiere screening at the Eccles, mind you. They waited until the moment the lights came up for a Q&A with the filmmakers, and Winterbottom started fielding vehement criticism about the violence toward women.

First question: “Disgusting!” yelled a woman as she got up and stormed up the aisle.

Winterbottom, after a long pause: “Next question?”

Whether the film, a period noir about a West Texas deputy sheriff with dangerous sexual issues adapted from Jim Thompson’s classic 1952 novel, has any theatrical prospects turns out to be less interesting than the perennial debate the film sparks about art vs. exploitation when it comes to violence in cinema.

Does the violence work in the context of a deeper exploration of a character’s psyche, or that of society as a whole? Or is it displayed in a vacuum without any redeeming context to provide meaning to a viewer other than an indictment of their being willing to sit through it in the first place?

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Despite my own pervading interest in cinematic explorations of violence — and my admiration of Winterbottom — my experience landed in the latter category. It doesn’t help that a wildly improbable and over-the-top finale pushes the film into something more like black comedy, which in turn undercuts the purported realism of the violence earlier in the movie.

Audience members were repeatedly prodding Winterbottom during the Q&A to provide some greater meaning or backstory that would help them accept what they had just suffered through. The director protested that, as in Thompson’s novel, he wanted to explore the noir theme of “a sense of pleasure in the violence. The violence should be shocking.”

Mission accomplished.

My impression was that the post-screening discussion didn’t really help anyone make sense of the unexpected assault on their psyches. To use Affleck’s cold line from the movie: “Nobody has it comin’. That’s why nobody can see it comin’.”

The performances by Affleck, Alba, Hudson and especially Elias Koteas as a man who sees through Ford’s charming exterior, are all pretty riveting. But to what end?

The truth about “Killer” is that most of whatever attention it eventually draws will come in the form of prurient interest in its sickening brutality and its rough, S&M-tinged sex, complete with Hudson and Alba displaying their perfect bare asses to relentless belts and bruises.

Tom Bower, who plays an elderly sheriff who believes in Ford, put the film in the company of provocative movies such as “Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer,” “In Cold Blood” and “Half Nelson,” which served up uncomfortable, realistic portraits of humans’ darker natures. To Bower, a veteran actor, the question itself is worth making the movie: “What do you feel about it?” he asked the audience at the Q&A. “Why do we sit and watch it?”

To quote one of the film’s doomed characters: “You ask an unpleasant question, bud, you might get an unpleasant answer.”

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