The latest production stills to hit the web from Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me” certainly aren’t going to quiet the controversy around his latest film. ONTD picked up on the stills, and they aren’t pretty. The normally angel-faced Jessica Alba is shown here with tremendous scarring across her face, and in one image, shows Casey Affleck handling a knife in the foreground. Another has her seated in a chair wearing a neckbrace. We’ve got the most salacious stuff pictured, but you can see the other small handful of new (and tamer) pictures at the link above.
The stills confirm the vicious nature of the film which divided audiences at Sundance. In the film, based on Jim Thompson’s pulp novel, Affleck plays a small-town sheriff who also happens to be a murderer hiding a pile of bodies. Alba plays a prostitute in the film, who we imagine starts a relationship with the troubled sheriff. As Movieline reported at the time, Alba was the centerpiece of one particularly violent sequence in which Affleck’s character hits her “in the face, at full force, repeatedly. The camera does not turn away, and as he takes a good dozen shots at her head, her features begin to distort at each impact with his closed fist. As she lies on the floor, unconscious, unrecognizable, and barely breathing, he asks if she can hear him. He tells her he loves her, and that’s he’s sorry. He then takes several more punches.” Yikes.
IFC picked up the film and has slated it for release this summer, and no doubt they’re hoping to duplicate the success of last year’s equally controversial “Antichrist.” If you’re in New York City, you can catch the film early at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival.