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Mr. Brooks (Trailer) is a movie that works on a few different levels. It’s a serial killer movie, a psychological thriller, a horror movie, a family drama, and a document of a personal struggle with addiction and metal illness.

To sum it up Kevin Costner plays the title character, an upstanding business and family man who is sometimes controlled by an addiction to killing (embodied in schizophrenic-like visions by William Hurt). Demi Moore is the cop tracking him down while dealing with her own ugly divorce and Dane Cook is a man who witnessed one of the murders. But that’s pretty much only the setup and it’s hard to talk about much more without giving away key plot points.

I was compelled to write about it here, however, because it’s one of the most visceral reactions I’ve ever had from a movie. It’s one of those movies that messes with your psychologically because it’s all kinds of fucked, so you come out of the movie not even knowing what to think. It’s terribly gory and celebrates violence it portrays. The really wonderfully disturbing part is that it makes you revel it just like Mr. Brooks.

The movie draws favorable comparisons with greats like Seven, Fight Club, A History of Violence, and American Psycho.

Honestly my only complaint was that, though the film purports to be based in Portland, Oregon to a one time resident it clearly is not (having instead been filmed mostly in Louisiana). There are other implausibilities in the movie but it takes them with a running start and never looks back, and, after doing the same myself, I embraced them too.

According to Costner, it’s the first part of a trilogy so we should hopefully be expecting more wonder-fuckedness soon. There’s certainly a lot of more ground left to explore with the characters established in the movie. I’m looking forward to it.