Since Lou narrates the Thompson novel, and film is by its nature a more detached and objective medium than fiction, there are limits to how well Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran can capture the book’s eerie, haunting power, or Lou’s willful lack of self-knowledge. But the novel’s most notorious scene, in which Lou calmly pulls on a pair of black gloves and sets about beating his hooker girlfriend to death, all the while apologizing to her and telling her he loves her, is rendered in explosive and terrifying detail. It serves as a rupture in the film’s narrative of reality, one almost as dramatic as the moment when the film appears to break in the projector during Bergman’s “Persona.”

Up till then, Lou appears to be an intriguing, somewhat dark film-noir hero. Yeah, he’s cheating on his wife, he bends his law-enforcement role to suit his own purposes, he has an appetite for sadomasochistic sex. You may or may not find that distasteful, but it belongs to the genre. This horror-show does not. Here is this handsome, intriguing good-boy/bad-boy character, in whom we have invested at least a little prurient identification, pummeling a beautiful woman’s face into a grisly, bloody mass while murmuring, “Hold on, sweetheart. It’s almost over.” You sit there in shocked disbelief: This can’t be happening. But it is.

It’s a dreadful scene that provokes powerful emotions: Pity and terror, of course, for Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba, in the movie), who loves Lou passionately and yearns to make him happy and would probably still forgive him for this vile betrayal. Beyond that, though, what’s also shocking is the sense that we are implicated in the crime: It’s as if, by taking the ride with Lou through his moral ambiguity and his smoldering, dangerous sex scenes with Joyce, we’ve given him permission to push through all possible boundaries of good and evil and decency and sanity, like a demented Nietzschean Superman. You get the same feeling, in a somewhat different fashion, from reading the book. Thompson almost taunts us: OK, crime-fiction readers, you want a story about a dark-hearted killer? That’s what you paid for, right? Well, try this.

Unfortunately, “The Killer Inside Me” has already become a Rorschach blot that reflects the public’s widely varying ideas about extreme media depictions of violence, especially violence against women. I say “unfortunately” because few of the pro-or-con responses based on that perception will do justice to the work itself. If you believe, or fear, that movie violence serves as a form of pornographic wish-fulfillment for male audience members, and may in fact legitimize or enable acts of real-world violence, then of course you’ll find the movie repellent and indefensible, no matter how well it’s executed or what its creators have to say about it.

One could certainly argue that that view is simplistic and uninformed. (I’m reminded of then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attacks on the “Grand Theft Auto” games, which she clearly hadn’t even looked at, let alone tried to play.) At the risk of starting a long and contentious sidebar discussion, I’ll suggest that generations of sociologists have tried and failed to establish clear links between watching violence on-screen and committing violent acts in person. Leaving that issue aside, the most common rejoinder from defenders of media violence — that it plays a complicated and cathartic role for the spectator, whose focus shifts back and forth from victim to perpetrator — may miss the point of Thompson’s novel even more.

Winterbottom’s adaptation of the novel is spellbinding cinema, with all the atmosphere, technical excellence and expert pacing the British director is known for. Perhaps more important, it captures much of the nihilistic soul of Thompson’s novel, which aims to be a self-undermining critique of crime fiction, as well as a bleak biblical parable about the darkness and violence he sees at the heart of America and masculinity and perhaps human nature. In a funny way, “The Killer Inside Me” comes closer to agreeing with its critics than its defenders; it’s almost a work that argues that it ought not to be seen (or read), or at least ought not to be necessary.

I would argue, in fact, that the book and movie’s portrait of Lou Ford pre-echoes some second-wave feminist ideas about men, women and rape, such as those of Susan Brownmiller. Thompson believed that male-female sexual relations, even in their so-called normal guise, contained hints of violence, and that it didn’t take much to tip them over into terrible brutality. He definitely does not depict Lou and Joyce’s S/M sexual relationship as innocent and consensual play (as contemporary p.c. sexuality would have it), but as the mutual opening of a door that leads to much darker places. There are hints of a psychological explanation, if you want them — Lou has a history as both a sexual abuser and an abuse victim — but the boundary between normalcy and raving psychotic madness seems dangerously permeable.

As I wrote in April, to complain that “The Killer Inside Me” is full of misogynistic violence is a little like reading “Moby-Dick” and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Violence against women is Thompson’s text and theme and central metaphor — and in case I haven’t made this clear, anyone who might find the violence in this movie gratifying or arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of professional help.

Played by Affleck with unruffled aplomb, Deputy Lou doesn’t even carry a gun because crime in the oil boomtown of Central City, Texas, is nearly nonexistent. But beneath his ultra-normal veneer Lou has the tastes and background of a depraved European aristocrat (indeed, I suspect Lou served as an inspiration for Thomas Harris’ creation of Hannibal Lecter). He’s probably the only person in Central City who reads Freud and listens to Schubert — or whose sexual appetites suggest the Marquis de Sade or Georges Bataille.

Within the first few minutes of the film, Lou is sent to run Joyce out of town and she responds by slapping and slugging him. She’s bored and lonely and sick of sleeping with ugly guys for money; she’s looking for a reaction, and she gets one: On the verge of walking out, Lou comes back and tackles her, pulling down her panties and whipping her bare ass with his belt. The sequence is both erotic and violent, profoundly troubling and potentially arousing, designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional, psychological and libidinal responses. It sets the table for what follows: an exploration of the dividing line between sex and death that’s at least as morbid and philosophical as anything in modernist European literature. 

Depending on your point of view, Lou is either a deranged sociopath or an inevitable product of his environment, and the genius of Thompson’s novel — and of screenwriter Curran’s extraordinarily faithful adaptation — lies in the fact that interpreting what happens is entirely up to you. Lou himself does not understand why he does the vicious and bloody things he does (Affleck narrates some portions of the film in bursts of Thompsonian prose), but as the story becomes increasingly fantastical and grotesque, he gets a pretty clear idea how it’s going to end.

You can make a case for “The Killer Inside Me” as one of the most important American novels of the 20th century, but it’s essentially a work of fatalistic allegory, and as Winterbottom’s film goes along it can’t help becoming more like an ordinary crime movie. Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas and Simon Baker stand out among the cast of befuddled Central City locals — Baker plays the out-of-town lawman who first suspects that Lou’s behind the local crime wave — but Kate Hudson is a bit stranded as Lou’s doomed fiancée, Amy. She meets a similar fate to Joyce’s, late in the film, and while Winterbottom is sticking close to the book here, as elsewhere, I think he’s violating a cardinal rule of moviemaking: Show us something shocking once, and it has a didactic force. Show it again, and it becomes technical, or sickening, or both.

If the pileup of corpses and the ensuing ludicrous conflagration that ends “The Killer Inside Me” is the only conclusion Lou can imagine, Winterbottom and Curran might have thought a little harder about the fact that Lou is completely insane. In a novel, especially one with an unreliable narrator, there is no necessary distinction between fantasy and reality, and no way to verify or falsify the narrator’s account. Lou Ford longs to destroy not just himself and those around him — especially those who love him — but also the story he’s telling and those of us reading or watching it. If Winterbottom’s film were literally a bomb that blew us all up after we watched it — that blew us up because we watched it — it might fulfill all its antihero’s and original creator’s ambitions.

“The Killer Inside Me” opens June 18 in theaters in many major cities. It will also be available  on-demand via IFC In Theaters, on most cable-TV systems. 

There were reports at the time that co-star Jessica Alba, who plays a prostitute who is literally beaten to a pulp by Casey Affleck’s deputy-sheriff protagonist, had walked out of that Sundance screening in disgust. Alba later denied this, and on Tuesday night at the film’s New York premiere in the Tribeca Film Festival, she and other cast members (including Kate Hudson, whose character suffers a similar fate) mounted an articulate defense of Winterbottom and his movie.

“Believe it or not, when I read the script it was a little bit watered down from the novel,” Alba said during an onstage chat with blogger and critic Glenn Kenny. “I read the novel and found it incredibly powerful. I took it to Michael and said, ‘I want to shoot this.’”

What “this” means is a story about one of the most chilling antiheroes in fictional history. On some level, complaining that “The Killer Inside Me” is full of misogynistic violence is akin to reading “Moby-Dick” and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Lou Ford (played brilliantly by Affleck) presents at first as a baby-faced, all-American small-town cop, who doesn’t even carry a gun because crime in Central City, Texas, is nearly nonexistent. But beneath his ultra-normal veneer Lou has the tastes and background of a depraved European aristocrat (indeed, I suspect Lou inspired Thomas Harris’ creation of Hannibal Lecter). He’s probably the only person in Central City who reads Freud and listens to Schubert — or whose sexual appetite goes quite so far into sadomasochism, and beyond.

Within the first few minutes of the film, Lou responds to being slapped and slugged by Joyce Lakeland (Alba), a hooker he’s running out of town, by pulling down her panties and whipping her bare ass with his belt. Is this safe and sane, consensual S/M play? Absolutely not. Is it what they both want? Absolutely yes. The sequence is both erotic and violent, profoundly troubling and potentially arousing, designed to provoke a whiplash of emotional, psychological and libidinal responses. It sets the table for what follows: an exploration of the boundary between Eros and Thanatos, love and annihilation, that’s at least as dark as anything found in the collected works of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille.

Depending on your point of view, Lou is either a deranged sociopath or an inevitable product of his environment, and the genius of Thompson’s novel — and of screenwriter John Curran’s extraordinarily faithful adaptation — lies in the fact that interpreting what happens is entirely up to you. Lou himself does not understand why he does the vicious and bloody things he does (Affleck narrates some portions of the film in bursts of Thompsonian prose), and perhaps the best way to understand “The Killer Inside Me” is as a savage Biblical parable that might be about America, might be about masculinity and might be about human nature.

Now, the Tribeca premiere was a much different and more carefully managed event than the Sundance catastrophe. This was a relatively small audience of well-connected New Yorkers and film industry insiders, exactly the sort of people likely to pride themselves on their sophistication (I observed no walkouts). As mentioned earlier, the movie was followed by an intimate on-stage conclave featuring the actors and director, with no audience feedback invited. But make no mistake, this is an extremely tough film to watch, and it’s meant to be. Some viewers will surely react with the visceral disgust that woman expressed at Sundance, and that’s every bit as legitimate as a more detached and analytical response.

In the worst of several gruesome scenes in “The Killer Inside Me,” Lou pulls on a pair of gloves and methodically sets about beating Joyce to death with his fists. (Spoiler police: This doesn’t count, I promise.) This scene is shocking in its graphic and bloody depiction of violence, and perhaps more shocking in what it suggests: Joyce’s eagerness for unbridled rough sex has opened the door to something much worse, and has even, in some sense, invited a brutal self-destruction that corresponds to her own self-hatred.

As Jessica Alba put it: “I think she bonds with him and encourages him to release his inner darkness. I think she’s found her soulmate, her guy, and in some way she knows how it’s going to end.”

Worst of all, perhaps, is the way Lou keeps telling her that he loves her and that he’s sorry, and then keeps on hitting her. “Hold on, sweetheart,” he tells her, in a tender lover’s voice. “It’s almost over.” He gets worked up through physical exertion, but seems emotionally calm and untroubled.

This scene raises many unmanageable and explosive questions, and it definitely does not present a politically palatable version of male-on-female brutality in an era when we have been trained to believe that sex is not violence and violence is not sex. Thompson’s view (and Winterbottom’s) is more fatalistic (and perhaps also more romantic) than that. I would even argue that the book and movie’s portrait of Lou Ford pre-echoes some second-wave feminist ideas about men, women and rape: Male-female sexual relations, even in their normal guise, contain hints of violence, and it doesn’t take much to tip them into apocalyptic darkness.

“The Killer Inside Me” will be released later this year by IFC Films, and a full review should wait until then. In the post-film discussion, Casey Affleck discussed the picture’s aims admirably. “I hope there’s room for discussion around this film, and room for people to tell us we’re being irresponsible,” he said. “But to me, irresponsible is when you have a movie where 300 people get killed by robots, and none of it matters, none of it registers. In this movie, we wanted the violence to seem real, and the victims of violence to seem real. I think we’ve been very responsible in how we approached the violence. I wouldn’t have done the movie otherwise.”