Michael Winterbottom finds the killer inside Jim Thompson

Shocking murder scene every bit as painfully memorable as in the book; now that's a successful adaptation
Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me
Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me PR

Finally, someone gets Jim Thompson just right, and still nobody's happy. I'm surely not alone in thinking that the crime writer's violent, nihilistic essence has never arrived on the screen unalloyed. In Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, for which Thompson wrote the screenplay, his black-hearted sensibility is mediated through Kubrick's competing aesthetic. Steve McQueen slashed pages of Thompson's dialogue from the screenplay of The Getaway (1972), while Sam Peckinpah, ordinarily no slouch in the realms of nihilism, quailed before the hellish bleakness of the original ending. Stephen Frears's The Grifters is adequately nasty but a little too bright, and Burt Kennedy's 1976 version of The Killer Inside Me, starring Stacy Keach as psychotic Texas sheriff Lou Ford, simply lacks the author's true venom.

To get Thompson right, one has to take him cloven hoof and all: you can't put a positive spin on such a pessimistic worldview. Director Michael Winterbottom, in remaking The Killer Inside Me, seems inwardly to have asked his audience: "Do you really want Jim Thompson undiluted? I'm not sure you do, but here he is. Cover your eyes." Thus he simultaneously diagnoses his predecessors' failures and demonstrates why his version has been so ill-received.

He's been accused of misogyny thanks to a scene in which a prostitute (Jessica Alba) is murdered by Casey Affleck's Ford. It's a shockingly ugly event: precisely as in the book, Ford punches her face until it collapses in on itself. Once read, never forgotten: I felt ill when I read it and ill when I saw it; to me that suggests a successful adaptation.

Allegations of misogyny should trouble any artist, and interviews suggest that Winterbottom, never a frivolous film-maker, is perplexed by them, and perhaps half persuaded. But his is a time-honoured narrative strategy which, while more acceptable in the finer arts, always draws wrath down on popular directors. Withdrawing authorial judgment and forcing an audience to construct its own moral relationship with the material is risky. There is no moral arbiter inside The Godfather; you're halfway through GoodFellas before you notice you're having a riot with these murderers. No one condemns narcotics or larceny in Drugstore Cowboy, or mass murder in Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer – and so each of those movies took its ration of grief from the critics for failing to spell things out with numbing obviousness.

Depicting a brutal, misogynistic act by an avowedly misogynistic character does not in itself endorse violence towards women, just as depicting murder doesn't condone it, and no artist should live in fear of the 0.1% of nutters who take works of fiction as instruction manuals. I think we now know why no one ever dared to get Thompson right until Winterbottom.