Killer Joe

Killer Joe (2012) is William Friedkin's pitch-black crime thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Matthew McConaughey plays a Texas police detective who hires himself out as a contract killer. Rated NC-17, the film is mean, funny and unsparing.

Drowning in drug debt, young Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) cooks up a plan to have his own mother murdered so the family can split the life insurance. The catch: Killer Joe Cooper wants payment up front, and Chris has nothing. So Joe takes a retainer instead — Chris's fragile younger sister Dottie, played by Juno Temple. From there the Smiths, including their dim father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) and his wife Sharla (Gina Gershon), set off a chain of events that spins out of anyone's control.

The script comes from Tracy Letts, the Pulitzer-winning playwright adapting his own stage work. Friedkin, the director behind The Exorcist and The French Connection, turns it into a brutal trailer-park parable about greed, with McConaughey's soft-spoken Joe scarier than any blade he carries. Not for the squeamish. Stream Killer Joe (2012) online on iFILM.