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This is a work of stylish, existentialist brutality, filled with beautiful women and damaged men. The gorgeous 1950s retro appearance of The Killer Inside Me manages at first to distract from its lack of moral compass. But soon the audience is trapped in the mind of a sociopath, unable to look away from even the most gruesome acts of violence.

The ever-adaptable director Michael Winterbottom has sold his soul to film noir with this adaptation. This is pulp fiction that literally involves women being beaten to a pulp — "her face looked like hamburger meat," as it says in the original Jim Thompson novel, upon which the script is closely based. Winterbottom has made a curious decision to give most of his film the mysterious, shadowy distance of an Edward Hopper painting, while leaving the sadism like a raw wound on the screen.

Deep in the heart of Texas, Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff whose Boy Scoutish clean-cut image disguises that he is a quietly deranged killer with a messed-up past. Affleck is chilling and plausibly pleasant all at once, with a high, reedy Southern drawl that raises hackles. As he tips his hat and addresses women as "Ma'am" in the opening scenes, we know it is all about to get very nasty. Affleck handles the inbuilt schizophrenia of the part well — his eyes suddenly go blank, and we overhear his obsessive, murderous thoughts.

Like the cult novel, the film is seen from Ford's point of view, so his two women — a prostitute played superbly by Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson's girl-next-door fiancée — appear more as objects than human beings, hard to stomach in these modern times. No wonder Thompson was known as the "dime-store Dostoevsky".

This is not witty noir in the Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett sense. It is much more harrowing, despite the cool graphics of the title sequence, the dark lipstick and the ranks of pastel cars from the cinematographer Marcel Zyskind. In the fading light a cream police car with a red domed light on top looks like a giant cupcake with a cherry. Beautiful exteriors support an ugly interior monologue.

The cruelty polarised the audience when the movie had its premiere at the Sundance festival, and the moment when Affleck gets his black leather gloves on in a seamless transition from consenting S&M sex to violent death seems to flirt with torture porn. That was probably not Winterbottom's intention, but it is the result. The director was operating at a more ironic level: hence the pop song Shame on You that plays over the credits.

Winterbottom is not averse to transgression: indeed his first film, Butterfly Kiss, has lesbian serial killers rampaging across northern England and 9 Songs was notoriously sexually explicit. Yet other films have been strongly political, such as The Road to Guantanamo and Welcome to Sarajevo.

The Killer Inside Me also gives a fascinating picture of the stifling world of small-town Texas. Power lies in the hands of a drunken sheriff and the oil magnate Chester Conway, whose wastrel son loves the same prostitute as Ford. But Ford destroys all those who love him most. Along the way the body count ratchets up, and the plot tangles up.

Whether you are beguiled by this film or sickened, it doesn't quite work. Somehow when Lou Ford was the book's unreliable narrator, the character's motivations were clearer. Instead, The Killer Inside Me leaves behind a cold-blooded emptiness.

But that's nihilism for you.

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