What did you think this was? - Killer Joe review

William Friedkin is a director with a love for the making and breaking of audiences expectations. Who else has the young star of his film cry “fuck me, Jesus” while putting a crucifix in her delicates (The Exorcist). Who would kill off the main character of a film twenty minutes from the end and carry on the story anyway (To Live and Die in L.A.). Killer Joe is an exercise in stripping away the barriers to the point that you really won’t know what’s coming next. And you’ll know less and less whether you’ll want to find out at all.

Matthew McConaughey is Killer

The film, adapted for the screen by Tracy Letts from his own stage play, is far from hard-boiled film noir. It has been smoked and dried in the dirt and it feels rough. The cinematography and lighting create a mucky, sleazy, claustrophobic atmosphere in which the Smith family’s decadence and stupidity unfold. From the moment Gina Gershon’s character, Sharla, opens the door to her stepson, Chris entirely bottomless we are taken close into the Smith family consisting of said stepmother, Ansel, Chris’s popa, and the naive and innocent, but no less backwards, Dottie. After petty drug dealer Chris gets indebted to the wrong people, he needs a lot of cash, very fast. Being bottom-feeding trailer trash they naturally don’t have thousands of dollars to hand so Chris devises the plan to off his mother and collect her lucrative insurance policy. The Smith’s unanimously agree with the plan and as Dottie so eloquently puts it “what good’s she doing anyone”. 

Enter the cool, charming, reptilian ‘Killer’ Joe Cooper, Matthew McConaughey in a blistering attempt to tell the endless rom-coms of his past to ‘suck my chicken’. Joe, a police detective, for a tidy sum of money hires himself out as a hitman. As Joe becomes entangled with the Smith’s, primarily the impressionable Dottie, the film descends into uncharted territories. The issue of the films sexual politics has been bounded around, many finding it an impassable barrier. The fact is the film doesn’t really have any sexual politics to speak of being pretty much morally baron. If you can take the story as its own beast with the relationships and sexual acts of the film to be no grander than the film in seclusion you will still be shocked and most likely appalled but you will accept the film on its own terms. Perhaps that is all Friedkin can ask of most people who see Killer Joe, to accept it.
 

The films take on black comedy (if black is a dark enough shade) is… well, it’s different. We often hear of films being talked of as ‘the audience laughed in all the right places’ or ‘the audience jumped in all the right places’. As it is, there isn’t much ‘right’ in Killer Joe and you may well find yourself, as I did, to laugh at something only to glance on either side of you to see if someone is looking at you with scorn and disgust. There is no right place to laugh in Killer Joe, you may laugh, you may not. The point is that any film that can vary the state of an individual in a way that transcends simply liking it or not is at least very interesting.  This is most certainly a very interesting film and if it sits right with you than it is a very entertaining one.

The Smith family dressed to impress

It isn’t as lean and intense as Bug(2006) Friedkin’s previous descent into Letts’ claustrophobic creations, but it has a manic, perpetual state of unrest and a film of such tight craftsmanship that is hard not to admire. I do admire the film very much and I enjoyed the film very much also. The film shocked me and took me aback but with atmosphere, with ingenuity and with violent lunacy, not with grim torture and pain free from irony. And that in this age of cinema is a success.