CREEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS

In the middle of Texas Killing Fields, two detectives are examining the body of a murdered young woman, lying half-submerged in the water of the title marshland. Detective Heigh (Jeffery Dean Morgan) observes a fingerprint on her neck, & at the same moment it starts to rain. In a panic, he & his friend Detective Stall (Jessica Chastain) struggle to preserve this crucial clue while pulling the wet, unwieldy corpse onto the bank.

It’s a harrowing, heartbreaking scene, maybe the best in this grim & atmospheric police drama, loosely based on true events & directed by Ami Canaan Mann. It reflects the overall experience of Texas Killing Fields: You get a glimpse of the forces behind the horror, & then the hostile, unpredictable environment shifts, & you’re lost again.

It’s rare for an American crime movie to treat a dead body as something other than a prop, a font of exposition, but the bodies of young women that keep turning up in this small, grungy Gulf Coast Texas city, or dumped in the marshlands adjacent, have a physicality, a wretched weight. The investigators aren’t depicted, in the manner of so many movies of this sort, as casual & business-as-usual around the victims; they’re anxious &, though they speak softly, palpably angry.

The angriest is Detective Souder (Sam Worthington), Heigh’s partner & Stall’s ex-husband. His anger leads him to stupid, counterproductive outbursts of violence, but it also paralyzes him. Heigh wants to explore the link between their victim & a string of others that have been found in the “Killing Fields” nearby, while Souder wants nothing to do with cases outside his jurisdiction, especially on his ex-wife’s turf.

He’s pretty sure that his & Heigh’s case is linked to a sordid prostitution ring in town anyway. Heigh, a haunted ex-NYC cop & a devout Catholic—he murmurs the Hail Mary over a victim—suspects that there’s a bigger picture. Both of them are terrified for Little Anne (Chloe Moretz), daughter of a miserable local hooker (a shockingly haggard-looking Sheryl Lee, of Twin Peaks). Poor Anne seems appallingly tailor-made to join the gallery of victims.

Director Mann (the daughter, as she is probably weary of reviewers noting, of Michael Mann) nails the settings—the town is a muggy, dirty shithole that’s no place to live, let alone die, while the marsh, with its twisted, leafless trees, would have an unearthly beauty if it weren’t so charged with threat. She shows a strong touch with the actors here, too. Worthington, Chastain & especially Morgan are so low-key that it’s almost disorienting at first; they aren’t working from the standard cop-show-acting playbook, even when Donald F. Ferrarone’s dialogue seems to call for it. But their controlled intensity accumulates force.

Mann & Ferrarone are less successful with the police-procedural side of the material; at times I found myself confused, & not in the good way. But there’s an emotional maturity to Mann’s work here which even some of her father’s films can’t claim—an awareness of the reality of human suffering that can without too much pushing be called authentically tragic.

It comes out, especially, in her handling of Moretz, as Little Anne. She strikes me as one of the least smarmily sexualized adolescent girls I can think of in many a movie. Through the other characters, & through her alert, sympathetic, unleering camera, Mann treats Little Anne not as a white trash Lolita but as an imperiled & precious child.