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‘the killer’ review: michael fassbender is an unsettled assassin in david fincher’s wry, pleasingly pulpy thriller.

The director's latest work for Netflix also features Tilda Swinton in a location-hopping genre exercise that couldn't be more different than 'Mank.'

By Leslie Felperin

Leslie Felperin

Contributing Film Critic

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Venice Film Festival Competition THE KILLER

At least no one will get to the end of director David Fincher ‘s latest, The Killer , and feel in any way misled by the title. Or the film’s droll, on-the-nose tagline for that matter: “Execution is everything,” arguably the most Fincherian tagline ever, as a colleague pointed out.

However, this killer is compelled to vary his usual routine when a hit in Paris goes wrong. The result is a satisfyingly retro, location-hopping genre exercise with fisticuffs, gadgets (albeit ones bought from Amazon) and smooth-talking antagonists that all plays like a tongue-in-cheek spoof of James Bond movies, but with a much more amoral anti-hero. The ending even lands in such a way that Netflix — working with Fincher again even though his admired series Mindhunter for them was cancelled — could turn this into a franchise.

In fact, in some respects The Killer is an anti-Bond, anti-super-cool-assassin film, an exercise in subverting expectations. In terms of costuming alone, in the hands of designer Cate Adams, instead of dapper tuxedos, elaborate disguises or supposedly camouflaging black turtlenecks, the killer dresses in deliberately boring ready-to-wear duds, usually in shades of depleted beige or exhausted cream. Early on, his deadpan, American-accented voiceover (abundantly deployed here, recalling Fincher’s Fight Club ) explains that he’s aiming to look, at least while on assignment in Paris, like a German tourist, because the French “avoid German tourists the way most of us avoid street mimes.” That said, he is still incarnated by the ineluctably photogenic Fassbender, so his cheekbones alone could be used as deadly weapons.

All these aural elements become more fragmentary and disorienting in the lead-up to the hit that goes wrong, inciting the action that follows. The killer is compelled to flee, disposing of the elaborate rifle he used by dismantling it and throwing the pieces in various sewers and passing garbage trucks in an atmospheric moped-assisted escape sequence.

After responsibly reporting the mishap to his handler (Charles Parnell), he heads home to the Dominican Republic. But when he arrives at his stylishly modernist white-walled villa by the sea, he finds someone got to his house before him and beat, brutalized and possibly raped his romantic partner Magdala (Sophie Charlotte). Miraculously, she survives and reports that her attackers were a man and a woman who arrived by taxi.

The rest of the film ambles alongside the killer as he goes about hunting down those who hired the hit on him and hurt Magdala. As in the John Wick franchise, but with wittier one-liners, the essential motivation for everyone appears to be revenge, pursued with completist relish and mixed with a certain fastidiousness about not leaving any traces or surviving witnesses. Since we never get a chance to see the killer with Magdala before she’s attacked, it’s harder to get invested in their love, so her suffering feels like little more than collateral damage in an impersonal war of attrition between this man and his foes.

At several junctions, the killer doesn’t do what many viewers might expect, and that unpredictability persists right to the end, but possibly not in an entirely satisfying way. Let’s just say that morally, The Killer is all over the place, which may alienate some viewers. Others may delight in both the protagonist and the film’s puckish, zero-fucks-given attitude, one that seems entirely, atheistically uninhibited by fear of a punitive deity or higher moral purpose.

As the killer says, there is no luck or fate or life path except the one behind you — a bracingly existentialist philosophy that goes with the mid-century modern vibes from the film’s many references to Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 classic Le Samourai .

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The Killer Review

27 Oct 2023

The Killer (2023)

David Fincher is back on familiar terrain. His last film, 2020’s Mank , felt like an unusual left-turn: a deeply personal period passion project, co-written with his late father, it was as sweepingly romantic as it was slyly cynical — but, with such a narrow focus and such niche preoccupations, it held less mainstream appeal than his usual fare. With The Killer (adapted from the French graphic novel Le Tueur , by writer Matz and artist Luc Jacamon), the director returns to the kind of material that cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s most singular, incisive, ingenious genre filmmakers: bringing his unique artistic rigour to familiar blockbuster components.

It’s thrilling to see him back in the thriller world. A sweatily suspenseful opening sequence (the film comprises six chapters, plus prologue and epilogue; even the structure is neat) establishes the universe with ferocious clarity. As that prosaic title suggests, our focus is almost entirely on one assassin, a hitman-for-hire never named, and played with unblinking, icy intensity by Michael Fassbender — his first screen role in four years . When we meet him, he’s in the midst of a job: to take out a wealthy target in a luxury Paris hotel.

Through Fassbender’s coolly delivered, dry-as-dust voiceover, which falls somewhere between first-person novelistic narration and the character’s own internal monologue, we learn a little of what it takes to do what he does. He is pure efficiency, methodical to the nth degree; every scenario gamed, every outcome foreseen. He practises yoga and repeats meditative mantras (“Stick to the plan... Weakness is vulnerability”), which would sound like new-agey corporate motivation techniques, if they weren’t in service of murder. He listens to The Smiths to slow his resting heart rate, Morrissey’s morose warbling penetrating the film’s soundtrack throughout (and now, hilariously, forever associated with sociopaths). He is, in short, a well-oiled machine.

It is pure pleasure to luxuriate in imagery made with such obvious, deliberate care.

And then... something goes wrong. His Parisian hit — a simple “Annie Oakley” job, as The Killer puts it — goes awry, seemingly down to a very human distraction, sowing the first shred of doubt that this cold, heartless man is as robotically detached as he claims. It sets in motion a series of events that sees his stock- in-trade violence seep into his private life, initiating a jet-setting revenge yarn that recalls everything from Death Wish to Kill Bill .

Though nothing quite matches that opening salvo for pure cut-glass tension, some brilliantly staged sequences soon follow. Particular shout-outs must go to a staggeringly well- choreographed fight with another man known only as ‘The Brute’, played by Sala Baker (aka Sauron from Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings ), which could jostle John Wick: Chapter 4 for best fight scene of the year; and a more cerebral stand-off with a fellow assassin, played with typical intrigue by Tilda Swinton .

Throughout it all, as you might well expect, Fincher’s filmmaking is immaculate. It is pure pleasure to luxuriate in imagery made with such obvious, deliberate care. You feel his precise framing, his careful composition, his notorious multiple takes. It seems, too, like Fincher is drawing on his past strengths: you can recognise the patient procedural plotting of Seven or Zodiac , the nihilistic themes and sardonic narration of Fight Club , the ruthless, unsettling violence of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo , the outlandish moral relativism of Gone Girl .

But what does it all amount to? To the very end, The Killer remains something of a cipher, a blank canvas of a human. We are welcomed inside the head of this unthinkable perspective, without ever truly learning the whys or the wherefores. Is Fincher pondering the soul-cost that such a vocation might bring, a theme even the most recent Bond films have toyed with? Is it another angry screed on capitalism and masculinity? Should we even draw parallels between The Killer’s diligent approach to work and Fincher’s own fastidiousness (a lazy comparison, perhaps, but one the director seems to invite)? Or should we just take it all at face value — simply a slickly made genre exercise, enough on its own merits?

After such a strong build-up, the film’s ultimate arm’s-length aloofness might feel frustrating, especially in its muted finale. For a director who crafted two of the best endings in cinema history ( Fight Club and Seven ), The Killer ’s climax, ultimately, proves to be curiously anticlimactic. David Fincher is unarguably a master filmmaker, so with every new film of his, fairly or not, you expect a masterpiece. The Killer doesn’t quite reach that level — but even then, most filmmakers would kill to make something this good.