A representative has dismissed speculation that Jessica Alba is disgusted by her violent new movie The Killer Inside Me, after the actress was spotted walking out of its screening.

The film, which is directed by Michael Winterbottom and based on a 1952 pulp novel by Jim Thompson, has sparked outrage for its depictions of extreme violence against women, according to the Toronto Star and the New York Daily News. It stars Casey Affleck as small-town Texas sheriff/psychotic killer, Lou Ford. Alba plays a prostitute who, in one scene, is graphically beaten for several minutes.

Alba’s walkout from the Monday screening at the Sundance Film Festival, lead to murmurs that even she was unable to handle the violence. But her rep says this is nonsense and that the actress, 28, only left the cinema to catch a plane.

Her rep Brad Cafarelli explains, according to Contact Music, “This rumour is silly and not accurate at all. Jessica had seen the final version of the film just prior to coming to Sundance and was pleased with the outcome. She came in to support the film and the filmmakers by introducing the screening, which she did, and left right after to get home to her family in L.A., as planned.”

The Toronto Star reports that, after the screening, Winterbottom was confronted by angry audience members demanding to know why it was necessary to show such gratuitous violence toward women.

But the story does have fans. The late director of A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, called the novel, The Killer Inside Me, “Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”

(Photo by PR Photos)

Story provided by the Dish Information Corporation