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William Friedkin's "Killer Joe" is one hell of a movie. It left me speechless. I can't say I loved it. I can't say I hated it. It is expertly directed, flawlessly cast and written with merciless black humor by Tracy Letts . It's about the Smiths, the stupidest family I've ever seen in a movie that's not a comedy.

The Smiths live in a trailer that is apparently somewhere near Dallas, although we never see a street or a skyline suggesting the city. Our clue is the Dallas police car used by Killer Joe. Whoever painted it must have known where he was. Killer Joe is not stupid, but he makes the mistake of never realizing just how dumb the Smiths are. He's played by Matthew McConaughey , soon after " Magic Mike ," and both films take advantage of his reptilian charm and his snaky, hunky, me-first aura. This is one of his best performances.

Killer Joe is known as a cop who sometimes hires out as a contract killer. His services are mentioned to Chris Smith ( Emile Hirsch ), a witless young man who desperately needs to find money to pay drug dealers before they kill him. He suggests to his father, Ansel ( Thomas Haden Church ), that they hire Joe to kill Chris' mother (Ansel's first wife) so they can collect on her life insurance policy. We never meet the intended victim, but she will obviously not be missed; when kid sister Dottie ( Juno Temple ), the youngest person in the film, overhears them, she says it sounds like a good idea. "What good is she doing anyone?" Chris asks, begging the question of what good he, Ansel and Dottie are doing anyone.

There is one more Smith, Sharla ( Gina Gershon ), who is Ansel's current wife, and Chris and Dottie's stepmother. Falling out of her dress, with her mascara often smudged, she could be the poster child for that underused word "slattern." She not only goes along with the scheme but may have more to do with it than anyone realizes.

The film depicts a world that is holding onto habitability by its fingernails. Filmed by the great cinematographer Caleb Deschanel , it depicts a place where a billiard parlor has one table, fires burn all night in empty oil drums, chained pitbulls bark and slather, the nights are dark and stormy, and the flat-screen TV seems to be playing the same video about monster trucks over and over again. Striking a blow for good taste, Killer Joe eventually lifts the TV over his head and smashes it to the floor.

Almost everyone gets smashed to the floor in this movie — Chris twice, by drug dealers and Killer Joe. There are a lot of broken noses, swollen purple cheekbones and bloody faces. There is also a lot of nudity and sex, and McConaughey has an eerie power in one scene where he smoothly stage-manages Dottie in her deflowering, and another where fellatio is performed on a fried chicken drumstick. The movie is rated NC-17, and rightly so, and answers the question of how much sex and violence a mainstream movie requires to earn that rating. In my opinion, the MPAA should set the bar lower. The MPAA cautions, "graphic disturbing content involving violence and sexuality, and a scene of brutality." A scene of brutality — singular? I counted six.

Friedkin and Letts have worked before as director and writer, in the claustrophobic masterpiece " Bug " (2006). They swing for the fences. "Killer Joe" played at Chicago's small Next and Profiles theaters, and then moved over to the larger Royal George, winning rave reviews ("this anatomy of depravity" — Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times). I can hardly imagine the experience of it onstage; it epitomizes the physicality that's typical of Chicago theater. As a film, it's something else. The audience laughed at the right places, applauded at the end and walked out talking about how disgusting it was.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Killer Joe (2012)

Rated NC-17 for graphic disturbing content involving violence and sexuality, and a scene of brutality

102 minutes

Emile Hirsch as Chris Smith

Gina Gershon as Sharla

Juno Temple as Dottie Smith

Matthew McConaughey as Killer Joe

Thomas Haden Church as Ansel

• Tracy Letts

Directed by

• William Friedkin

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Meet the Murderer, the Best of a Bad Lot

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By Manohla Dargis

• July 26, 2012

It says something about William Friedkin’s big-screen adaptation of the Tracy Letts play “Killer Joe” that the title psycho, played by Matthew McConaughey, is, by a long Texas mile, its least objectionable character. Dressed in nearly all black from cowboy hat to boot, with a miserly smile and a dead man’s empty eyes, Joe Cooper, a k a Killer Joe, looks sharp, talks smart. As given demented life by Mr. McConaughey, he is a welcome presence among a collection of nitwits so irremediably disposable that they’re as evanescent as drops of water on a hot wood stove. These are people, the filmmakers suggest, who by their deep-fried stupidity and avarice deserve to fade quickly.

Not fast enough, it turns out. The bad times begin with Chris (a miscast Emile Hirsch), a gambler who tries to pay off his debts by having his mother killed for an insurance jackpot. He’s the story’s first idiot. He shares his plan with its second, his father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church, good), a mechanic, and suddenly it’s a family affair. Ansel’s new wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon, working hard in a wretched role), learns about the scheme, as does Chris’s virginal sister, Dottie (Juno Temple, also miscast), a Daisy Mae type in cutoffs without any baby doll appeal. Together they scheme and scream, biding and wasting time in a trailer park where a barking pit bull and a blaring television add to the art-directed squalor.

Chris hires his hit man, Joe, and discovers that he’s signed on with the devil. Here, as in other movies that use violence to jolt up the dreary proceedings, Chris and his problem turn out to be the warm-up act for Killer Joe. And Mr. McConaughey’s magnetic murderer is definitely the main attraction. He dominates his every scene with a hushed voice that carries a threat and a tensed, restrained physicality that suggests a rattler before it strikes. He’s a queasily compelling nut job reminiscent of the one in Jim Thompson ’s pulp classic, “The Killer Inside Me,” and because Joe has the best lines, a mysterious back story and is played by a real star, the movie needs his juice badly.

The other characters are merely supporting players, and so too are the actors wrangling the roles. Of these Mr. Church, buoyed by his comic deadpan and inherently funny slurry, whiny intonation, comes off the best. Mr. Hirsch puts energy or at least twitching into his performance, but the character is such a one-dimensional contrivance, a means to a dramaturgical end, that it’s hard to see any actor making it work. Both Ms. Temple and Ms. Gershon bring out the worst in Mr. Friedkin as a director. He lingers over their naked bodies for no narrative reason (however dubious her role, Ms. Temple doesn’t look like a little lost girl), and takes such a creepily intimate approach to Sharla’s and Dottie’s violent degradation that you might think he enjoys it.

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Killer Joe Reviews

In Killer Joe, director William Friedkin reaches magnificent new lows as he descends into playwright Tracy Letts' world of southern-fried depravity, stupidity, sexuality, and possibly (almost certainly) madness.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 3, 2022

Killer Joe is pitched squarely as a rotted black comedy of errors, a cavalcade of one disaster after another from a bunch of fools tripping over themselves in the pursuit of the one thing that drives America: Greed

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Sep 23, 2022

You won't see anything else like it this year.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Sep 18, 2021

The great William Friedkin's Killer Joe is raw and visceral. It's not a pleasant watch by any stretch of the imagination- but it is good. Very good.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 24, 2021

It's so good at being wrong - a 'dark comedy' in the full sense of the term.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 31, 2020

Killer Joe will be a highly divisive film and I myself can't say I necessarily "enjoyed" it rather than experienced its unique brand of tragi-comedy. The final act is a phenomenal sequence...

Full Review | Mar 31, 2020

Killer Joe is tense, character-driven and McConaughey gives the performance of his career.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 10, 2019

Friedkin kills it with Killer Joe.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2019

A useful reflection on the nature of tyranny, and how it cowers and make zealots of the weak and vulnerable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 31, 2019

A dark, twisted, glorious throwback to delirious exploitation cinema in vogue at Friedkin's peak in the 1970s, this is one of the most enjoyable, provoking and hilarious films you'll see this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 27, 2019

Life is stranger than fiction, they say. But few pieces of fiction are as strange as the oddly winsome Killer Joe.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 27, 2018

Killer Joe's scenes are long and dialogue is of a high quality; by turns funny and absurd, yet also desperately sad.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 5, 2018

McConaughey's performance as Joe, the psychopath killer with some extreme sexual fetishes, is particularly impressive.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 23, 2018

As the head of this diamondback-rattlesnake-of-a-film, Matthew McConaughey strikes within a sadistic realm very few actors would dare to tread.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jan 26, 2018

Killer Joe is such a hideously over-the-top, black-hearted view of Southern-fried scumbags that even Texans like myself can't get offended.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 25, 2017

I'll never look at fried chicken the same way again.

Full Review | May 12, 2015

Killer Joe is trash. Not bad trash. Not pretentious trash. Just plain old ugly, funny, and sophisticated trash.

Full Review | Aug 11, 2014

The tone in Killer Joe feels so expertly and delicately crafted that we only laugh at the film's absurd scenarios if and when the filmmaker permits it so.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jun 2, 2014

Violent, coarse, perverted, and sickly hilarious, this is highly recommend for those who like their entertainment on the nasty, demented tip.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 25, 2013

This Southern-fried, darkly humorous trailer-trash exploitation crime noir revels in the greedy characters' idiocy and the deranged story's psychosexual luridness.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 17, 2013

Killer Joe (2011)

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

As a sadistic dallas cop who moonlights as a hit man, Matthew McConaughey is on fire in Killer Joe , fierce and ferociously funny. In fact, the Texas-born McConaughey, 42, has been blazing since he stopped spewing rom-com swill to do The Lincoln Lawyer . Since then, he’s etched a strong character portrait as a prosecutor in Bernie , shaken up Cannes as a gay reporter in The Paperboy and delivered a showstopping, Oscar-caliber turn as an aging stripper in Magic Mike .

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In Killer Joe , the first play written by Tracy Letts (a Pulitzer winner for August: Osage County ), McConaughey oozes good-old-boy charm and coiled menace. He owns the movie, which William Friedkin directs with the same hothouse intensity he brought to the 2006 film of Letts’ play Bug .

That intensity, violent and sexual, may have prudes bolting for the exits as Joe mixes it up with trailer trash. Emile Hirsch excels as Chris, who hires Joe to kill his mom. Sweet. The insurance will pay off his $6,000 gambling debt. Chris gets no help from his dim-bulb dad, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), and Dad’s new wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon, a study in lurid), who answers doors not topless but bottomless. Since Chris can’t pay Joe, the lawman offers a trade for Chris’ virginal sister, Dottie (a terrific Juno Temple). Friedkin catches the dark humor of the piece, but excess brutality gets the better of him and the movie, especially the wince-inducing pain Joe doles out to Sharla (you’ll never look at a drumstick the same way again). Even when the film goes too far over the top to be saved, McConaughey mesmerizes.

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Edelstein: Matricide and McConaughey in William Friedkin’s Urgent Killer Joe

Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater is rightly celebrated for plays in which actors get in one another’s faces from the start and then keep hissing, driving, flaying — the kind of plays that, on the big screen, put the feeb in febrile, not because real human beings don’t act that way but because Actors Acting do. What a happy surprise that two of Steppenwolf playwright Tracey Letts’s early works — Bug and now Killer Joe , his breakthrough — have been turned into knockout films, both directed by William Friedkin, who’s more potent than ever at 76. In Killer Joe , Friedkin opens up the action without losing the pressure-cooker compression that makes Letts’s torpor torturous and his characters’ bad thoughts boil over into much worse acts. The violence, when it comes, is nonsensically garish — and makes perfect sense.

It’s a family drama, of course, and gets right to the point with a young man planning matricide. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) is a high-strung ne’er-do-well with incestuous dreams about his tremulous, 20-year-old virgin sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), and a whopping debt to gangsters who’ll shortly kill him for sure. When he learns that his estranged mother, by all accounts a hateful drunk, has a fat insurance policy naming Dottie the sole beneficiary, he wastes no time in bringing his scheme to his groggy-loser of a dad, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) — who’s more than okay with the idea of murder, as is Ansel’s sneering slattern of a wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon), and, finally, Dottie, the ingénue. What they need is a professional hit man — and he arrives in the form of Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a bent Dallas police detective in a black cowboy hat.

McConaughey cemented his stardom as a rom-com hunk, a Most Beautiful person, but have you ever noticed how bizarre his features are — his long nose and shark eyes and face that’s all Picasso-flat planes? I’m still not sure if he’s a great or even a very good actor, but his slowish timing is stubbornly his own, and from his deliberate phrasing — one word at a time — it’s instantly apparent that the killer Joe is out of his mind. Precisely what form his madness will take is a mystery, though, especially when he gets all courtly around young Dottie, who asks him if he has ever fired a gun and he says, nodding gently and sadly, as if to a small child, without ever taking his eyes off her, “Yes.” When Chris can’t pay Joe’s 25-grand fee up front, he says he’ll kill Chris’s mother for a “retainer” — Dottie. Before long, Joe has become the family’s son-in-law, de facto patriarch, and ruler.

Other writers circle in on unpleasant truths for fear of arriving at their destinations too early, but in Letts’s world, there’s no finish line: He makes a left off the Harold Pinter rotary, a hard right at Sam Shepard–ville, and barrels straight into the swamp. Killer Joe would be tiresomely reductive if it weren’t so urgent. On-screen, the characters move from the Smith family home (one small step above a trailer) to a strip club to a ruined pool hall to a shuttered amusement park and back home, but it’s all the same impacted psychological space. Such juicy psychoses, such savory parts. Hirsch gives the play its desperate center, Haden Church its slow-witted moral void, Gershon its noirish female cunning, McConaughey its whiplash brutality — and Temple, so frail, so damaged in such nonspecific ways, its wild card. Letts and Friedkin make no attempt to soften the characters’ monstrousness, and thank hell for that. This is rave and rage and purge acting.

Most of the violence is saved for the last scene, and it’s a Grand Guignol opera — way over the top. But as splashy as  Killer Joe  is, it’s also, beat by beat, meticulously orchestrated, with no shortcuts to the carnage. When it comes to mapping psychoses, Letts and Friedkin are diabolically single-minded cartographers.

• movie review
• david edelstein
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• matthew mcconaughey
• gina gershon

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Review by Brian Eggert August 25, 2012

In Killer Joe , director William Friedkin reaches magnificent new lows as he descends into playwright Tracy Letts’ world of southern-fried depravity, stupidity, sexuality, and possibly (almost certainly) madness. Although renowned and perhaps overshadowed by his early-career classics The French Connection and The Exorcist , as of late, the director has found a fruitful union with Letts’ often lurid material, having worked together on 2007’s fascinating Bug . Here, their partnership has earned an NC-17 rating, a ruinous signifier of hopeless commercial aims and limited theatrical distribution, which means most moviegoers will probably discover the title on home video. But the rating is sometimes also a badge of artistic integrity, since both the filmmakers and distributors felt changing their exploitative little “trailer park noir” to meet the requirements of a lesser R-rating would compromise its effectiveness. To be sure, every outrageous morsel of degeneracy sizzles on the screen without reservation and feels strangely appropriate in this Southern Gothic nightmare.

A morbid combination of Double Indemnity , Tennessee Williams, and the basest episode ever of The Jerry Springer Show , Letts’ twisted tale opens in a Texas trailer park just outside Dallas, Texas. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) arrives in the rain in the middle of the night, a chained Pit Bull named “T-Bone” barking at him as he raps on a trailer door to ask his father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), for $6,000 to help him pay off a local gangster for an overdue drug debt. After Ansel’s new wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) answers the door bottomless (because how was she supposed to know who was knocking?) Ansel tells Chris he doesn’t have the money. No matter, Chris sells Ansel on a plan to kill his own mother, Ansel’s ex, whose $50,000 life insurance policy will supposedly go to Chris’ virginal but wholly corrupted sister, Dottie (Juno Temple). And to get away with this perfect crime, they’ll hire Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey), a Dallas detective who moonlights as a contract killer.

Trouble is, Joe’s fee is $25,000 upfront. The other half is to be split four ways among Chris, Ansel, Sharla, and Dottie, the latter of whom the rest are trying to keep in the dark about their scheme, although she seems to understand exactly what they’re doing. After spying on Dottie in her braless innocence, Joe suggests the family turn her over as a retainer until his murderous deed pays off. Without much hesitation, they agree. Ansel even thinks “it might do her some good.” Chris expresses mild reluctance, but that might be his unconscious incestuous feelings for his sister coming through. And so, a first date of sorts is arranged between Joe and Dottie, where, after a jovial serving of tuna casserole, he demands that she strip and coolly stages her deflowering through a series of precise orders, to which Dottie complies, albeit with a strain of internalized reluctance. Joe is nothing if not methodically precise. He demands good manners, and upon his arrival in any scene, shows his absolute control over the other players. But underneath his suave exterior is a kind of psychosis that’s not fully revealed until the film’s unsettling conclusion that, the disturbing “K-Fry Chicken” sequence aside, depicts sheer lunacy. There’s a moment when Joe snaps suddenly and destroys the TV, which always seems to be blaring some monster truck nonsense because it’s impolite to have the TV on during a serious discussion.

McConaughey gives a slick and sadistic performance, using his natural southern charms and onscreen authority to make his killer instantly the most watchable character onscreen. His motions are deliberate, sexy, and creepily methodical, but also devilishly charming in a way only McConaughey can be (see The Lincoln Lawyer or Magic Mike ). Like him, the rest of the cast is superb. Haden Church’s dry, knows-he’s-dim role results in a constant stream of belly laughs, even when the film reaches its grisliest moments. One thing the viewer doesn’t expect is how funny Killer Joe proves to be, due in large part to the Sideways actor. Hirsch, meanwhile, remains the ever-hapless high-energy protagonist, whose pathetic desperation could use a little more planning. Gershon is effective as bitchy trailer trash and doesn’t show much dimension until she’s traumatized in a notorious drumstick fellatio scene near the end. But it’s Temple’s performance that remains so deceptively complex; her duality within her situation stands as the film’s big question, on which the bloody, ghastly, open-ended finish hinges.

Beyond the performances, which are the film’s highlight, Friedkin’s technical approach demands notice, as his formal presentation hasn’t been this composed for decades. Using aggressive editing to mirror the story’s tone, editor Darrin Navarro (who also assembled Bug ) employs abrupt jump cuts that convey a sort of disjointed montage during a chase scene and in the explosive end. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who worked with Friedkin on 2003’s The Hunted , captures rainy, sloppy, trailer park palettes and a certain crispness in the daytime chases and meetings in abandoned pool halls, but especially in eerie dream sequences. The mood of the finale is wonderfully shot and lit, most of it from a distance to evoke the stage play origins of the piece. When the lights are dimmed for the family’s last meal, the mood is excruciatingly weird and dark, but it looks gorgeous and totally transfixes the audience into the disquieting scene.

Still, one must not dwell too much on the sex and violence in this picture, of which there is much. It doesn’t encapsulate the film; it just adds a necessary and intentionally over-the-top flavor to this vicious farce. Violence spills out in harsh beatings, ugly bruises, broken noses, and bloody faces, while the sexual content never feels like it’s trying to be enticing, just sordid. Underneath that which resulted in the NC-17 rating are colorful characters and wild performances interacting in the blackest of black comedies you’ll ever see. Of course, Killer Joe isn’t for everyone. It’s the kind of film that prompts the theater manager to announce beforehand, “there are no refunds after the first thirty minutes” because attendees have been asking for them. In other words, you should know what you’re getting into. And chances are, if this material sounds intriguing to you right now instead of appalling, no doubt you’ll love what a juicy, ferocious film Friedkin and Letts have unleashed.

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Review: ‘Killer Joe’ steps into the abyss with Matthew McConaughey

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Out of the muck and mire of human depravity that is “Killer Joe,” something magnificent comes: a killer performance by Matthew McConaughey.

The actor has already had a stellar year playing lowlifes. But his dirty Dallas detective Joe Cooper, who has a lucrative sideline as a hitman, is arguably the best of the worst, out-sleazing his East Texas prosecutor in “Bernie” and out-stripping his Xquisite club manager in “Magic Mike.” Never has the actor’s molasses drawl been more lethal.

Never has noir been more diabolically naughty either. The film, directed by William Friedkin and adapted by Tracy Letts from his play, is ostensibly about the complications of a contract killing. Chris (Emile Hirsch), a hapless drug dealer, has no prospects, an overdue debt to his supplier and an angry mother. Getting rid of mom and collecting the life insurance payoff seems the easy, maybe the only, answer. But it will require help from the family — his grease-monkey dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), hyper-sexualized stepmom Sharla (Gina Gershon) and his slightly dazed and confused beauty of a sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), who is the sole beneficiary of the policy.

The desperation that drives the film and sends Chris to plead his case is there from the first frame. “Killer Joe” opens on a rainy night in a muddy trailer park that has never seen better days. A junkyard dog is straining at his chain as Chris frantically bangs on the door. When Sharla finally answers, she stands framed in dull light wearing nothing but a shirt and a snarl.

That sets the tone of all that follows. It is also one of the full-frontal shots that helped earn “Killer Joe” its NC-17 rating, along with a good deal of extreme violence, though I’d bet the sexually twisted subtext is what sealed the NC deal.

“Killer Joe” is a brash bid for a comeback from a director who has had many fallow years since his 1970s heyday. The tension-building that helped earn Friedkin an Oscar for 1971’s “The French Connection” and the satanic chill of “The Exorcist” in ’73 make their way into “Killer Joe,” but none of the restraint is here. That makes this toxic slice of Texas crime lore exceedingly hard to stomach.

Before you can pity the mother whose life is on the line, there is a story about Dottie’s childhood that will explain a lot. This is a family on the margins of the social margins. Scratching to get by has left them with no capacity for decorum or debate. And soon the die is cast.

Though death hangs over the proceedings, it is not the end game. The film is really more of a leering look at the way in which serious intimidation can lead people to submit to humiliating things and how far a filmmaker is willing to push it. Fried chicken will never be the same after a particularly tasteless dinner scene. Neither will Dottie. (Temple, an actress who has mostly flickered through other films such as “Atonement,” is excellent at creating a dreamy disconnection, holding the focus as a woman-child.) She’s the collateral Joe wants, because there is no money for his upfront fees. His slow but deliberate seduction of the 20-year-old virgin is as mesmerizing as it is wrong, and it is so very wrong.

Chris is as close as the film comes to a good guy. Plot twists keep the pressure building, and the internal struggle between morality and expedience resonates in Hirsch’s flailing. When death finally does come calling in “Killer Joe,” it is horrifically brutal but delivered, like much of the other carnal carnage, with a punch line.

By far the film’s deadliest weapon is McConaughey. The way the actor leans into threats, dropping his voice, wrapping eloquence in sinister tones, is skin-crawling. The muscles in his neck literally seem to tense one by one. And if the eyes are the window to the soul, you really don’t want to peer for long into his. It is not an easy performance to watch, but it is unforgettable.

The cast around McConaughey is excellent at capturing the ethos of down-and-out blue-collar life. The film is heavily salted with a distinctive Texas flavor and deep-fried in noir by the exceptional cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (five Oscar nominations, including “The Natural”). There are moments of brilliance, saturated with the blackest irony, as the underbelly of an existence on the edges is exposed. There are other scenes that are so twisted — Joe’s sexual proclivities being chief among them — that the film becomes almost unbearable.

Letts, who won a Pulitzer in 2008 for another family squabble with his play “August: Osage County,” tends to favor damaged relationships with deadly consequences. But with “Killer Joe,” it’s as if he has stepped into the abyss. Friedkin is just trying to work his way out of it. But with McConaughey’s virtuoso turn as a completely virtueless man, the filmmaker may just have pulled it off.

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‘Killer Joe’

MPAA rating: NC-17 for graphic, disturbing content involving violence and sexuality and a scene of brutality

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

Playing: At the Landmark, West Los Angeles

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Incredible Star Wars Theory Links The Mandalorian Movie & The Empire Strikes Back In The Coolest Way

Now i understand why george lucas really didn't like the force awakens, glen powell clarifies reports of remake of kurt russell’s oscar-nominated thriller: “not really a thing”, watching the oddity that unfolds onscreen is enough to carry one from start to finish - and despite some truly disturbing scenes, this black-as-night comedy delivers quite a bit of off-beat humor..

In Killer Joe ,  Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) is a young, two-bit Texas washout with just enough smarts and small-time ambition to land himself in trouble with all the wrong kinds of people. Facing a debt he can't pay down, Chris comes crashing into the trailer-trash world of his estranged family, which includes simpleton father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), dragon-lady stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) and eccentric younger sister, Dottie (Juno Temple). Chris has a simple plan: hire a hitman to kill Ansel's ex-wife (Chris and Dottie's mother), and thereafter collect the $50,000 life insurance policy that will be bequeathed to Dottie.

The rest of the family jump at the chance to get rid of their devilish ex-matriarch, so Chris turns to "Killer" Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a lawman who moonlights as a hitman. But as with many such schemes, things don't go quite as planned, and when Joe develops an unhealthy fascination with Dottie, Chris is stuck with a price that he never, ever, wanted to pay.

Directed by Oscar-winner William Friedkin ( The Exorcist , The French Connection , The Hunted ),  Killer Joe is one of the more odd and challenging films I've had to review. Friedkin creates the world of podunk Texas life in such vivid cinematic fashion - and populates it with such uniquely trashy, funny, low-brow characters - that it's hard not to be drawn in. Just watching the oddity that unfolds onscreen is enough to carry one from start to finish - and despite some truly disturbing scenes (more on that later), this black-as-night comedy delivers quite a bit of off-beat humor.

The movie (based on stage play by Tracy Letts, who also wrote screenplay) is very theatrical in its staging and pacing, meaning that scenes each seem somewhat self-contained and weighted, even as they function within a larger narrative. Instead of the typical movie format (rapid turnaround of shots and images through editing), Friedkin's direction takes a stage play approach, presenting things through well-framed and prolonged shots, allowing the actors to move and function and develop the scene on their own, rather than through manipulation of the camera or the editing. The ensemble cast includes some quality players so this directorial approach works well, since the actors are in fact able to carry each scene they are in, without boring the audience.

However, there are distinct times when this "stage play" filmmaking format transforms into something much more visceral and challenging - namely during the multiple sequences of (often sexual) brutality that likely earned Killer Joe its NC-17 rating. Friedkin's lingering lens allows the actors - in particular McConaughey, who is a tour de force in this film-  to develop scenes in a way that "normal" moments slowly but surely devolve into insane and horrifying debauchery, while the audience - trapped in their voyeurism - twist and squirm, ultimately witnessing something more disturbing than what they probably imagined. Indeed, much of the Killer Joe experience can be likened to watching a highway collision about to happen - being unable to look away as this horrible event unfolds, laughing as it does, cringing and gagging as the carnage happens - and somehow, being tricked into laughing again while staring at the smoking wreckage.

In the midst of this strange, horrible, hilarious, cathartic experience, Friedkin manages to sneak in some (not so) subtle social commentary, with sacred slices of Americana culture - the cowboy lawman, the "get-rich-quick" American scheme-dream, family values, religion, television, even fried chicken - all getting a twisted and perverted makeover that is unnerving on many levels. The film's controversial finale is enough to turn people away from eating Kentucky Fried Chicken forever (although, true confession, I ended up eating fried chicken immediately after seeing it - though not without much shame and self-disgust).

As stated, Matthew McConaughey dives deep into his role as Joe Cooper and delivers one of the most captivating performances of his career. Joe is a Hannibal Lecture-style psycho - a mannered southern lawman who is also a psychotic monster. While these qualities seemed to be diametrically opposed, McConaughey instead makes them function simultaneously, which makes the character even more disturbingly memorable. Juno Temple is equally captivating as the oddball Dottie, the good soul who is inevitably corrupted by all the amoral people around her. For such a young actress, Temple handles some of the film's more challenging scenes with impressive nuance and control.

Thomas Haden Church is another standout as Ansel, who he manages to turn into a somewhat lovable genial idiot that makes some very, very, questionable moral decisions when it comes to the women in his life. Emile Hirsch and Gina Gershon play more straightforward (read: stock) character types, though they manage to inject the performances with a bit of extra spice. All in all, the family Smith is the epitome of fantastic dysfunction.

Killer Joe will likely leave many people in shock, confusion, and in need of a thorough shower by the time it's done, but those uncomfortable feelings don't prevent the film from also being a memorably odd experience that is likely to stick in your brain - and possibly affect your eating habits - for a longtime afterward.

Killer Joe is currently playing in limited release. It is Rated NC-17 for graphic disturbing content involving violence and sexuality, and a scene of brutality.

Killer Joe (2011)

Killer Joe is a dark comedy thriller directed by William Friedkin. The film stars Matthew McConaughey as a detective who is also a contract killer hired by a desperate young man, played by Emile Hirsch, to murder his mother for insurance money. As the plot unfolds, the characters are drawn into a violent and morally complex web of deception and betrayal.

• Movie Reviews
• 3.5 star movies

Killer Joe (United States, 2012)

Killer Joe earns its NC-17 rating. A gleeful and unapologetic descent into delicious decadence, Killer Joe is proud of what it is and never tries to be something it isn't. A slick looking exploitation thriller from veteran director William Friedkin, Killer Joe could easily be seen as a black comedy. It holds nothing back. The violence is brutal and graphic. The sex is sometimes strangely erotic and even more frequently kinkily disturbing. And the nudity doesn't stop at T&A. Gina Gershon channels Julianne Moore from Short Cuts and Juno Temple leaves little to the imagination. This is Friedkin unbound, with the fetters of the studio system cut away. Killer Joe is a helluva fun trip, but one senses devotees of Merchant-Ivory may be displeased.

There's a lot of talent involved in this production. In addition to Friedkin, whose resume will always be highlighted by The French Connection and The Exorcist , there's cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, whose lensing gives this movie much of its tone and atmosphere. He knows just how to shoot the gore and nudity to avoid the sleaze factor. The cast is comprised of recognizable names (as opposed to the unknowns who often populate exploitation movies): established actors Matthew McConaughey, Thomas Haden Church, Gina Gershon and Emile Hirsch, and up-and-coming starlet Juno Temple. Knowing who's involved makes the movie interesting before you see a single frame.

The story, which is based on a play by Tracy Letts, transpires mainly in a Texas trailer park. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) has come home to ask his father, Ansel (Haden Church), for $1000 to help clear a gambling debt. Ansel regretfully informs him that he has never possessed that much money in his life. That's okay, says Chris - he has a plan. His alcoholic mother (Ansel's ex-wife) recently took out a life insurance plan with Chris' sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), as the beneficiary. Dottie lives with Ansel and his new wife, Sharla (Gina Gerson). All they have to do is hire a hit man to eliminate Mom and they can split the proceeds. Chris even has candidate for the killer: Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a Texas police detective who does a little "contract work" on the side.

After Chris and Ansel contact Joe, they learn there's a problem: Joe demands his $25,000 fee up front. Promising him a cut of the insurance money won't work, but he is willing to work out a deal. He'll accept a deferred payment in return for a retainer. For the retainer, he isn't expecting money; he wants Dottie. And, having been charmed by him during their initial meeting, she is more than willing to go along with the deal. Ansel and Sharla endorse the idea. In fact, Ansel comments "it might do her some good." (He's worried because, at age 21, she's still a virgin.) Only Chris is reluctant and his dire financial predicament limits his options.

Killer Joe 's penchant for depravity seemingly knows no bounds. It's the chicken leg scene that seals the deal and represents one of the most bizarre sequences one is likely to encounter in a movie theater these days. Without having to bend its content to achieve an R rating, Killer Joe can go places that "envelope pushing" movies like The Hangover can't come close to. And, while there's plenty of suspense to go along with the overdose of kink, there's also a lot of dark, bleak humor. This film is sometimes very funny. Some of the interaction between Joe and Ansel is brilliant, especially leading up to the aforementioned chicken leg scene.

With Magic Mike and Killer Joe both under his belt (something he removes in both films), this has been a banner year for Matthew McConaughey. His Joe represents the ultimate bad boy - suave and sexy yet potentially lethal. Thomas Haden Church has not been this funny since Sideways , and he provides the same kind of dry, low-key humor that worked so well in the earlier film. Gina Gershon doesn't have a lot to do - at least until the drumstick - but she makes a memorable first impression. Then there's Juno Temple. Her character is fascinating because of all the contradictions she embodies, although I'm forced to acknowledge she's more of a male fantasy than a fully fleshed out personality.

An appreciation of the conventions of the exploitation genre are mandatory for enjoying Killer Joe . This is made for a particular audience and anyone outside of it is likely to be shocked, offended, or some combination of both. All the actors believe in the project - they never would have done some of the things they do if that wasn't the case. The bloodsoaked, open-ended finale may leave some viewers feeling a little frustrated, but it works in its context. Killer Joe is probably great drive-in fare. The NC-17 may make it difficult to find at a multiplex, thereby making it a video choice for many. In a way, that's a shame, because Deschanel's cinematography deserves a big screen. But, if you're an exploitation fan, this is one not to miss.

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Killer Joe Review

29 Jun 2012

103 minutes

Like fellow 1970s firebrand Francis Coppola, William Friedkin has grown content with the small and stagey. His latest film is based on a play by Pulitzer Prize-winning Tracy Letts, as was his last — the paranoiac Bug. Killer Joe was shot in 19 days, in a pocketful of Texan locations, gifting actors with mesmerising monologues to show off their chops. Sophisticated stuff, if you discount ersatz fellatio with a chicken drumstick.

Friedkin may have economised his grandstanding, but The Exorcist’s enfant terrible has hardly thrown in his lot with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s early birds. His new film has landed the notorious NC-17 rating in America for its lather of sex, violence, violent sex, and violent sex-related simulation. The atmosphere is as sticky as flypaper, the humour black as the inside of a rooster, and its offensive intensity will send you reeling in search of a shower.

We greet the dangerously dim-witted and unappetising Smith clan at their wits’ end (somewhere you suspect they frequent as regularly as the liquor store). Idiotic drug-bum Chris (jumping-bean Emile Hirsch), in hock to local goons, has turned to his even more acumen-deficient pop Ansel (showcasing Thomas Haden Church’s gift for the guileless) and suspiciously game stepmom Sharla (Gina Gershon, who apparently has a ‘no underwear’ clause in her contract) to hire a hitman to execute his matricidal scam. Enter silk-smooth Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey), a cop with an extracurricular line in murder, who is persuaded to work on a promise, as long as Chris’ younger sister Dottie (Juno Temple) serves as collateral.

Quite what genre we are loitering in is open to question. Killer Joe is Texan trailer-trash neo-noir, stage adaptation, crime-gone-wrong fable, and scuzzy, Tennessee Williams-on-crack family meltdown with a dubious line in female full-frontal. More lurid than the Coens, less self-aware than Tarantino, it’s Carnage with thickos; but Friedkin is in control, searching for light in very murky places.

Walking a perilously thin line between misogyny and applied depravity, he’s turned in a perverse spin on Cinderella — only innocent-with-a-twist Dottie’s Prince Charming is a scumbag in a big hat with “eyes that hurt”. McConaughey gives the film its Mephistophelean pull: his line-delivery lacquered with honeyed menace, he summons a dread-like gravity — a vilely hilarious stride along his quest to prove he is more than the jutting prow of Kate Hudson rom-coms.

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• FILM REVIEWS

KILLER JOE (2012)

• by Michael G. McDunnah
• August 4, 2012

In a cautionary tale about the dangers of stage-to-screen adaptations, Killer Joe, the first play by Pulitizer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts ( August: Osage County), becomes a lurid, overwrought hicksploitation flick in director William Friedkin's new NC-17-rated adaptation. Assaultively disturbing without the justification of depth, and the kind of "funny" that will make the raucous laughter of your fellow audience members creep you out, Killer Joe is a fascinatingly ugly misfire only partially redeemed by a pair of very strong performances.  Flawed, fatalistic, and foul, Killer Joe is not a film I can endorse. However—if you have a strong stomach and a prurient curiosity—it is definitely a film you will remember. 

On a plot level, Killer Joe falls comfortably into the "stupid-people-try-to-commit-a-crime" sub-genre of such (superior) films as Fargo and A Simple Plan . Chris Smith (an over-matched Emile Hirsch) is a low-level, trailer-park drug dealer who owes $6,000 to someone higher up the chain of supply. Chris comes up with a plan to murder his own mother for her insurance policy, enlisting the help of his dull-witted father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), and Ansel's trashy second-wife Sharla (Gina Gershon). To commit the crime itself, however, they enlist a professional: "Killer" Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a Dallas police detective who moonlights as a professional hitman.

Killer Joe, a polite, soft-spoken psychopath, has a certain way of doing things, and one of his policies is that he gets paid up front: he makes an exception, however, when he meets Dottie (Juno Temple), Chris's sweet, simple-minded little sister. He agrees to take Dottie as a "retainer"—a sleazy, exploitative arrangement to which Chris and Ansel offer only token resistance. ("Maybe it'll do her some good," Ansel offers, pathetically.) And so Joe becomes a dark Prince Charming courting the innocent Cinderella, a sexually-perverse Gentleman Caller insinuating himself into the family to claim the damaged daughter.

It is whenever McConaughey is onscreen—and particularly in the scenes between Joe and Dottie—that Killer Joe comes to electrifying life. Though he's seemingly been stuck in rom-com hell for the past decade, McConaughey has always been most effective when subverting his own natural charisma and southern charm with an undercurrent of darkness, whether in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, John Sayles' Lone Star, or his recent turn in Soderbergh's Magic Mike. (I didn't see the latter, but my girlfriend did , commenting that Soderbergh's direction must have been, "Do you, only darker.") Now, at 43, he has grown into his movie star looks to the point where he is not relying on them, but able to use them intelligently as just one of several complex character layers: like Paul Newman (a star he resembles in many ways), he becomes a more interesting actor the older he gets . Here, the contrast between his polite charm and Joe's barely contained psychopathy serves the duality of cop/criminal character well, and Joe becomes a near iconic distortion of the clichéd American western hero.

He is well-matched in Juno Temple, who has had small roles in films like Atonement and The Dark Knight Rises, but who gives a breakout performance here in a difficult, highly problematic role. Dottie is the film's most "literary" character, more a device than a person: she is and remains something of a cypher, called on at various points to serve as innocent victim, erotic MacGuffin, femme fatale, manic pixie dream girl, and divine hand of retribution. It is an impossible role—and one at the center of some very troubling and clumsily navigated sexual politics—but the fact that Temple pulls it off as well as she does makes her a talent to watch.

Gershon and Church are both excellent as well: Church plays one of the dullest characters ever captured on film, a man so slow-witted and wearied that he can barely be bothered to react when his life and family begin blowing up around him. Gershon has the movie's most demanding scene, as the film climaxes in a brutal physical assault and sick sexual humiliation.

And it is here, in the rushed, graphically violent final act, that Killer Joe goes completely off the rails, exploding from a tense crime drama into a stomach-churning campaign of shock and awfulness. The theater we attended seemed split right down the middle between people who found this final act nauseatingly horrible, and those who found it audaciously hilarious. I have rarely been as disturbed by an audience's reaction as I was in these final scenes: uncomfortable laughter is, certainly, a valid response to some of the Grand Guignol wretchedness of Killer Joe, but it felt like there was, among some viewers, an apparently unabashed enjoyment of physical and sexual violence against women that made us linger in our seats after the show just to avoid rubbing elbows with our fellow audience members as they filed out.

We can argue that any film that provokes such a strong reaction is worth making, perhaps, and no work of art should be judged by how some audience members may react. But I would have felt better disposed to Killer Joe if I thought its shocks and provocations were handled more responsibly. Gershon is a trouper, to be sure, but I can't help but feel that no one should put an actress through what she goes through here unless it's in service of something more important than sick laughs and shock-based provocation. As it is, I simply don't see enough value in Killer Joe to justify the extremes of exploitation that seem to be its only remarkable features.

And here is where I wonder if the entire project wasn't ill-conceived. Friedkin has made some great movies ( The Exorcist, The French Connection ), some terrible ones ( Jade ), and a great many more in between. This is his second adaptation of a Tracy Letts work—after 2006's fascinatingly unpleasant Bug— but I can't help but feel he was the wrong director for this material. His natural, faux-realist technique removes the necessary layer of unreality that would have been present in a stage version, and which a more stylized director might have brought. (Someone like David Lynch, of course, could have done things with Killer Joe, or perhaps the Coen Brothers, whose Blood Simple Letts acknowledges as in influence on his play.) Absent a more stylized tone, or the heightened theatricality of a stage performance, Killer Joe feels a little sleazy and shallow.

I haven't seen Killer Joe on stage, but I have no trouble imagining that it would be a viscerally intense, electrifying experience. But even if Friedkin's film is slavishly faithful to Lett's text, experiencing a play is very different from experiencing a film. Theater is a shared communal venture, with the actors sharing space with their audience, and both groups sharing energy—and responsibility—for the experience. Plays demand creative intellectual and emotional participation on the part of their audiences: an ethically responsible, imaginative engagement with the material, which film does not require. In the flatter, more graphic, more consumerist medium of cinema, Killer Joe 's shocks and brutality come across as more cynically manipulative, and its sexual politics seem more leering and grossly exploitative.

Michael G. McDunnah

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Killer Joe Reviews

• 62   Metascore
• 1 hr 43 mins
• Drama, Comedy, Suspense
• Watchlist Where to Watch

In this shocking black comedy, desperate drug dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch) hires a hit man named Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey) to murder his mother for the insurance money, but their plan ends up hitting a few snags.

We tend to speak in the past tense when discussing the works of great filmmakers, even if they’re still alive and active late in their careers. But every once in a while, a veteran director will surprise us by refusing to mellow with age, turning out a movie that’s every bit as ambitious, audacious, and daring as his early efforts. William Friedkin accomplishes just such a move in Killer Joe, a funny, unapologetically bizarre, and at times shocking adaptation of Tracy Letts’ pulpy stage play. And with a powerhouse cast to back him up, the result is a film that will leave you speechless. Chris (Emile Hirsch) is in serious trouble. He's just incurred a major debt to Digger Soames (Marc Macaulay), and when you're late paying Digger, you can wind up dead. His back against the wall, Chris goes to his father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) with a sinister proposition: They'll hire a killer to get rid of Chris' mother (and Ansel's ex-wife), then collect the insurance money that will go to Chris' teenage sister Dottie (Juno Temple), a seraphic sleepwalker who seems to exist in a world all her own. After bringing Chris' temperamental stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) in on the hustle, the young deadbeat and his dim-witted father enlist the services of Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a local cop whose authority and detailed knowledge of police procedures make him the perfect hired killer. But Joe doesn't come cheap, and when his fee proves bigger than expected, Chris and Ansel agree to let him have Dottie as a "retainer" until the insurance check clears. Just when it starts to look as if everything is going according to plan, however, an unexpected complication plunges the entire situation into total chaos. The first thing that grabs you about Killer Joe is Letts’ punchy dialogue. A vivacious mix of plot-propelling quips and telling barbs, it possesses a unique cadence and rhythm that, set against the backdrop of Friedkin’s brazenly cinematic imagery, immediately immerses us in a world of desperate, double-crossing lowlives and ruthless killers. And the actors handle it with the skill of seasoned pros: As the slow-witted father/son duo hungering for a big payday, Hirsch and Haden Church share a tragicomic rapport that keeps us laughing with nervous energy as their “perfect” crime slowly unravels. Gershon smolders as Ansel’s trashy, oversexed wife Sharla, a boozy floozy who doesn’t think twice about answering the door without pants. In the hands of any other actress, the ethereal Dottie could have easily thrown the entire equation off balance, yet the talented Temple portrays her with a compelling mix of vulnerability and transcendental wisdom. And with just a single onscreen appearance in the entire film, Macaulay’s Digger Soames is evil personified -- a genial psycho who might buy you a beer one day, and bury you the next. But make no mistake, this is McConaughey’s show though and through. Even in a career marked by eccentric characters, Joe Cooper is one of the most memorable; by injecting a potent shot of menace into the unsettlingly polite, coolly measured detective, McConaughey always keeps the audience off guard. We never doubt the fact that Cooper is in complete control even after the plan spirals into disarray, and once we finally witness the true depths of his twisted sadism in the final act, it’s enough to send more sensitive viewers running for the exits. Having previously collaborated on the 2006 thriller Bug, Friedkin and Letts prove especially proficient at complementing one another’s strengths to create a world that’s entirely convincing on its own terms. The characters, setting, and dialogue have all been honed to hyperstylized perfection, thrusting the viewer directly into the story from the rain-soaked opening shot (courtesy of five-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel), and holding us captive straight through to the brilliant last line -- one that’s sure to frustrate as many as it fascinates. But the beauty of Killer Joe is that even if you hang on every word, you’re still bound to miss some of the subtle nuances that make the film such a ferociously tense and funny affair, ensuring that subsequent viewings of this finger-lickin’ black comedy will be even more rewarding for those brave enough to go back for seconds.

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Killer Joe Review

The sweaty Texan world of Killer Joe is beset with the buzzed flicker of neon above ramshackle old trailer parks, a rain lashed, decrepit landscape inhabited by the under belly of society. Walking the streets are deadbeats and dimwits with cracked skin who are cloaked in ragged clothes and scraggly facial hair, growling in heavy regional accents.

The family which director William Friedkin and writer Tracy Letts  (their second cinematic collaboration) choose to focus on in this deep fried, grubby world is that of the dysfunctional Smiths. The painfully useless patriarch is Ansel ( Thomas Haden Church ), a down on his luck welder in his second marriage to the highly sexualised Sharla ( Gina Gershon ). Then there are the two kids. Dottie ( Juno Temple ), a pixie like young girl has yet to lose her innocence and the brother, Chris ( Emile Hirsch ), is a failed drug dealer who owes a lot of money to some very dangerous people.

In order to appease his debts with the creepy drug lords, Chris instigates a plot to murder his estranged birth mother with his father so they can pick up the insurance from her death, which would go to Dottie. In order to carry out the plan flawlessly and make it look accidental, they hire Detective “Killer” Joe Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), a crooked cop with enough knowledge of police procedures to pull off a significant hit.

Joe’s fee proves to be more than they can afford for the time being, so they wait for the insurance check to clear and they strike a deal that makes Dottie the retainer.  As unforeseen complications play out, Joe becomes further embedded in the family and things begin to take a very, very dark turn.

This marks Friedkin’s second collaboration with writer Tracy Letts . The two previously worked together on Bug , which is a film that now almost looks like a dry test run for the kind of cinematic world that Killer Joe inhabits. Swapping deteriorating motel rooms for the cramped conditions of a trailer, Killer Joe plays out with the same mephitic atmosphere of claustrophobia that thickened the breathing space of Bug . As Friedkin’s camera gets in tighter, so do our throats and our breathing functions begin to waver.

Friedkin’s terrific build of oesophagus tightening suspense is aided by an absolutely staggering performance from Matthew McConaughey . This year you can fully expect to see a full blown career revival for McConaughey. Whilst never really hitting the bottom feeding level of actors like Mickey Rourke and John Travolta , McConaughey had hit a creative roadblock through an intolerable amount of bad romantic comedies. Now, he clearly is fully willing to shatter his onscreen persona and craft a whole new career for himself.

He is mesmerising as the mephistophelean Killer Joe and it is a performance that is brilliantly nuanced, as soon as the character appears on screen the tone changes. McConaughey’s Southern gentlemen attitude is scratched away as his character’s charm and politeness goes a little too far. Every single line he says is etched with menace and power. In the relationship with the Juno Temple character (who is equally excellent), his character’s power to control others is shown through the most delicate of touches, the most simple of lines with the tiniest hint of malevolence brewing beneath.

But McConaughey is just as powerful when his monstrous character is allowed to go down to its darkest depths. The scene that has been talked about the most, the scene of sexual humiliation involving a fried chicken leg, is a scene that is as powerful and upsetting as it is because of how far McConaughey is willing to go to bring the audience the true understanding of his character. He has been working toward this performance throughout his career and he has managed to craft a character who you can’t take your eyes off.

With this, Bernie , Magic Mike , The Paperboy and Mud , 2012 is proving to be the year of McConaughey, where he can finally be respected as a great actor. And actor of range and subtlety, who isn’t afraid to take the piss out of himself or challenge his abilities.

As a director, Friedkin is fascinated with the dark side of human nature as well as the nature of evil in humanity. This has been dealt with very broadly in films like The Exorcist and in Bug it is done on a more disturbing, psychological level. Here, Friedkin’s fascination is with the extremes of evil and namely: how far is someone willing to go to get what they want? As the narrative progresses, the morals of several characters are severely compromised and the heightened glimpse into human nature shows the greed and desperation at the lower end of society, particularly, how deep people are willing to sink in order to stay out of trouble.

However, within the compromise of character morality, the morals of the filmmakers also begin to get dubious as the sexual politics of the film begin to get hazy. The scenes which have been called into question are there to vividly tell you how depraved these people are and to make you very, very uncomfortable. Whether the blurring of sexual politics to create a feeling of unease in the audience is acceptable or not comes down to the opinion of the viewer. Friedkin and Letts just about get away with it, as they are telling a very particular story about a very particular group of people in a very heightened, generic atmosphere that feels like a logical progression of their story.

Killer Joe , although originally a play,   doesn’t feel like a piece of material that is trapped in the theatre. Letts can write impeccably well, lacing truly memorable moments of pitch black humour and wonderful dialogue that feels naturalistic, while Friedkin presents some truly cinematic moments through set pieces and beautiful photography to make sure Killer Joe isn’t stagnant on screen.

As a filmmaker, Friedkin has lost none of his power to shock or cause discomfort and at 76 the man is still making films as if he were still making material like The French Connection . The film is deliberately a very dark and very nasty piece of work, lashed with scenes of brutal violence and humiliating moments of sexuality, but it very definitely is of a piece. Films like Killer Joe , that are designed to get under the audience’s skin, are rarely made anymore and are rarely so powerful. In this case, the film is worth seeing for a number of reasons, but mostly for a revelatory Matthew McConaughey and for a director who is getting back into the stride he hasn’t had for nearly 30 years.

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16th Aug 2024

New Alien movie promises to have the most ‘realistic, visceral’ carnage yet

Stephen Porzio

‘It’s never been done in the way we did it on this film, like in such a realistic, grounded, visceral way,’ the sci-fi movie’s director told JOE.

Alien: Romulus arrives in cinemas this week and you can read JOE’s rave review for the latest entry in the legendary horror sci-fi franchise right here .

The movie centres on a group of youngsters (led by rising star Cailee Spaeny) who attempt to pull off an ambitious heist but wind up running afoul of dozens of facehuggers.

JOE had the pleasure of speaking to co-writer and director Fede Álvarez about the blockbuster ahead of its release.

And we opened the chat by asking the filmmaker – who was a life-long fan of the series – about the things he always wanted to see in an Alien movie that he got to include in Romulus.

His response: more “realistic, grounded, visceral” carnage.

“Well, everything that’s in the movie is exactly what I wanted to see,” he told JOE – half-joking, half-serious – in his response to our question.

“I’m trying to think if there’s something I left out. I think if I left out some things, it’s because I was saving something for the sequel, if we get lucky enough that people want to see another one but it’s definitely – everything that’s in the movie, it’s the things that I couldn’t wait to see again.

“Specifically I think there’s some things that people tend to believe they’ve seen a lot of times like the chest bursting and stuff like that.

“But the reality [is]… on Alien, you had a good chest burst scene and then Aliens has a quick one then in the middle but then Alien 3 doesn’t really do it, I think Alien: Resurrection might have something there.

“But I think it’s never [been] done in the way we did [it] on this film, like in such a realistic, grounded, visceral way – I think it’s never been really portrayed in camera.

“So, there were a lot of those things I just couldn’t wait to bring to life for a new audience with modern techniques and with [a] more raw approach to filmmaking.”

Having seen Alien: Romulus, we can confirm that the movie is full-on with the gore – in the best way possible.

You can watch JOE’s full interview with Álvarez right here, although we get into spoilers during the conversation so it’s best to avoid until after you’ve seen the film.

Alien: Romulus is in UK cinemas now.

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