And so we come to the film chosen to officially open the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival; William Friedkin’s Killer Joe. It might seem as though Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) has been relatively quiet since his ’70s heyday, but nothing could be further from the truth. Although the ’90s were something of a wilderness period for him, the director has made nine feature films in the last thirty years, the most recent of which, Bug, won the prestigious FIPRESCI award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. His latest offering, the (very) black comedy Killer Joe, further confirms that this celebrated auteur still has the power to shock and enthral.
Essentially the story of a contract killing gone wrong, the film tells the tale of Chris (Emile Hirsch) and Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), a father and son who decide to cash in on a lucrative life insurance policy belonging to Chris’ mother by hiring the eponymous hitman to kill her. What they don’t anticipate is Joe’s decision to take Chris’ emotionally troubled sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a retainer for his professional services. As is so often the case with films of this stripe, an apparently simple plan begins to come apart at the seams, and the fallout from the killing plunges Chris and his family into a waking nightmare where everyone’s carefully-constructed facade begins to crack.
Matthew McConaughey is a revelation as Joe, a man who is both murderer and detective, and at times more an elemental force than a human being. That he would have struggled to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor even five years ago in Hollywood makes McConaughey’s transformation into the pallid, dead-eyed hitman all the more startling. His performance is undoubtedly the centrepiece of the film; charismatic and repulsive in equal measure, he inserts himself with disturbing ease into the family home, charming, threatening and cajoling his way into the hearts and minds of the people who have hired him. His true nature remains hidden until the final act, which climaxes with a surreal and shocking scene involving a chicken drumstick, sure to take its place alongside the ‘milkshake’ scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood as one of the most perplexing and bizarre sequences in modern American cinema.
Matching McConaughey all the way is British actress Juno Temple as Dottie, a young woman misunderstood by those around her and thus treated as little more than property, until she eventually takes her destiny into her own hands with lethal consequences. The chemistry between the two actors is undeniable as their twisted romance unfolds, although their rapport does unfortunately serve to make the interactions between other characters (Hirsch and Church in particular) look stilted and staged in comparison, despite fine performances from all the actors involved. Special mention should also go to Gina Gershon as Chris’ abrasive stepmother, who turns what could have been a rather two-dimensional and cliched character into a fully-realised human being.
Friedkin’s frequent use of close-up shots forces the viewer to focus on the minutiae of the character’s lives, emphasising the tiny building blocks which everyone uses to create a wall between themselves and the world. Throughout the film these barriers are gradually eroded by fear, rage and tension until every character’s monstrous inner-self is unleashed in an explosion of violence which, while shockingly brutal, is also punctuated with black humour. Though this transition initially seems jarring after the careful pacing of earlier scenes, writer Tracy Letts deserves credit for allowing Killer Joe‘s sustained tension to boil over and erupt into the madness which is its only logical conclusion. For this reason most of all, the film will inevitably divide opinion, but it remains proof that William Friedkin can still create challenging and affecting cinema, nearly forty years after the release of The Exorcist. Killer Joe is not a perfect film, but it is mesmerising.
Jim Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012
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