It isn’t easy to make a good film out of the pulp fiction of Jim Thompson. Burt Kennedy first tried to adapt this story in 1976 and came a cropper.

Now British director Michael Winterbottom, never one to worry about dipping into a genre he hasn’t tried before, has a go with the same story and the result is one of his best works. Even though the one sustained sequence of violence has already caused controversy, possibly more than it deserves, this Killer is stylish and convincing.

Casey Affleck heads the American cast, as smalltown deputy sheriff Lou Ford. He is engaged to a local girl, Amy (Kate Hudson), and seems an unassuming man — but he also happens to be a psychopath. Bribed to shoo a prostitute (Jessica Alba) out of town who has been troubling the son of the richest man around, he falls for the girl himself and proceeds to conduct a sado-masochistic relationship with her. Instead of finally telling her to leave, he takes other measures to get rid of her. It’s this scene that’s horrendous to watch, but if you go back to the original story — which is told, as the film is, from the point of view of the deputy — there’s little doubt that something pretty horrific is necessary. You hear more than you see, thanks to judicious cutting, and although some will think that the sequence still goes on too long, there needs to be the catharsis that Winterbottom provides at this point.

By now we know that Lou, whose broken childhood is hinted at in flashbacks, is capable of anything. Love and hate consume him. Sooner or later, we imagine, he is going to do something bad. Those who are on to him have secrets of their own and the small Texas town, so quiet on the surface, is soon a nest of vipers.

Thompson’s dark, bleak parable needs and elicits a terrific performance from a squeaky-voiced Affleck, who suggests a man who maintains a surface calm that might at any time burst. You have just enough sympathy for him to make the horror seem worse when it comes.

Hudson also gives an exceptional performance, and Alba has never been better, while Tom Bower as the elderly sheriff, Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas and Bill Pullman do everything expected of them in support.

Like the book, Winterbottom’s film is set in the Fifties but never succumbs to the kind of production design that deflects attention away from the story. It may not have the flair that the Coen brothers displayed in No Country For Old Men or the clipped brilliance of the masters of film noir but it works well precisely because it doesn’t try too hard for effect or for some nostalgic pastiche. The story is told in a way that Thompson surely would have appreciated, making an ordinary world slowly but surely unordinary. In that respect, it is as good as Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, also from Thompson.