Critics reviews

One of the best films of the past year—bracing, funny, uncompromising—arrives on home video in a package that makes good on its swelling rep as an American indie video nasty.

McConaughey plays the contradictions of his role smoothly and perfectly, never once distancing himself from the character's coarseness. The film is a cheerfully stark, full-sun thriller, a kind of demystified noir. 

That the film manages to be surprising at all in spite of these myriad shortcomings is somewhat remarkable, though the startling elements always feel less than developed.

Rarely has such an abundance of talent, on both sides of the camera, been employed to such brutally impoverished ends. You’ll find people who claim it’s a black comedy, but how anybody could laugh at the impassioned ugliness on display here is a mystery to me.

When he has us where he wants us – giggling and nervous – Friedkin the horror-meister returns, staging a couple of sequences so brutally and baroquely over the top that they'll probably be discussed for a long time.

Some critics have picked up on the fairy-tale elements, comparing it to The Night of the Hunter. Joe is a sinister father figure who infiltrates a family by playing both sides of the law. Robert Mitchum’s Preacher Powell bends the Ten Commandments; Joe, the Texas criminal justice code.

Mythical flourishes appear in the story as if to satisfy a homework assignment, which perhaps has something to do with the sense that all the oddball, falsely extreme depravity feels as deliberate as it is throwback-y.

Killer Joe works much better than its source material would seem to allow. Room is made for Friedkin to briefly stage one of his deftest chases, with Chris running from his creditors like Benicio Del Toro in The Hunted.

Writing about the basic plot and situation of this movie, I realize that it sounds almost exactly like a Coen brothers-style black comedy in the “Blood Simple” vein. There are similarities, but Friedkin and Letts are after something crazier and less controlled, something that veers from all-out farce to social realism to shocking brutality to unknowable mystery and even hints of the supernatural.

Mr. Friedkin, a director with a talent for kinetic screen violence, never finds his groove with “Killer Joe,” which lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism.

A hideously funny tabloid noir.

It's McConaughey who is the real revelation: All Grim Reaper strut and cutthroat stare, he savors each of Letts's vividly ghoulish lines.