  Jessica Alba in a scene from "The Killer Inside Me."
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PARK CITY, Utah — Jessica Alba left halfway through the world premiere of her grisly new crime drama at the Sundance film festival on Sunday night. She wasn’t the only one.
There were numerous walk-outs in the 1,200-seat Eccles Theatre during The Killer Inside Me — presumably a reaction to the film noir’s nauseating violence.
How graphic is it? It will make you miss being desensitized.
Adapted from Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel, Casey Affleck stars as Lou Ford, a sadistic small-town deputy sheriff whose innocuous veneer masks a psychotic murderer. Alba is the prostitute he becomes entangled with, while Kate Hudson portrays his sweet, suspicious girlfriend. Without revealing too much, both women wind up viciously brutalized, in and out of the bedroom, by Affleck’s sociopath.
While Alba helped introduce the film — neither Affleck nor Hudson attended — she was absent for the question-and-answer session that followed the end credits.
Instead, director Michael Winterbottom was left to defend the extreme content after an outraged woman in the audience berated Sundance for even showing it. “When you read the book, it’s incredibly shocking,” Winterbottom said. “But the violence is supposed to be horrible.”
The Killer Inside Me isn’t the only project Winterbottom has at this year’s Sundance film festival that is sure to polarize moviegoers either. He also adapted The Shock Doctrine, a documentary based on the book by Toronto author Naomi Klein.
