I’ve really been looking forward to footage from Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel The Killer Inside Me. I’m a massive Thompson fan, and adaptations of his novels have about a .500 average. (I’m the guy that doesn’t like The Grifters much; I infinitely prefer a movie like Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon.)

The cast here seems to be on the money — Casey Affleck as the duplicitous small-town sheriff deputy Lou Ford, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson as the women in his life, and supporting work from Ned Beatty, Bill Pullman and Elias Koteas. Now there’s a rough long-form sales trailer that makes the concoction look fairly potent. See it after the jump.

Give a big hand to The Playlist for digging up this trailer. Now, if you don’t know the story you might not want to watch this one. It’s about five minutes long and gives away most of the first act, but in a way that, to those new to the tale, will seem like far more is being shown than is really the case. This really plays up the involvement of Jessica Alba, though we’ll actually see more of Hudson across the span of the film.

What we don’t much see here is the grinning, dumb face of Affleck’s character Lou Ford. The idea behind the character is that he keeps most people at arm’s length by spouting white noise. He speaks in platitudes and cliches and generally makes people think he’s dumb as a post, if a nice guy. This trailer shows off more of the calculating truth behind that facade, so in that sense it again seems to give a lot away. (The novel is narrated in first-person, so what the trailer shows is, to some extent, stuff you’d get right off the bat. But not entirely.)

I like the use of the music from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but that also points to the qualm I’ve had with casting Affleck. Namely, this character is in some ways a lot like Robert Ford, and I’d hate to see the guy repeating himself.

Watch the trailer now before it gets pulled, and note: unless you work in a brothel I’d say it is quite NSFW.