The Killer

In his latest picture The Killer, director David Fincher examines the meticulous craft of an unnamed, philosophising hitman. With a much-anticipated performance from a newly returned Michael Fassbender, the film’s titular assassin joins an often refined and extensive club of professional cinematic killers whose clandestine occupation has long fascinated audiences. With stories slick with inherent violence and moral ambiguity, why are we so drawn to these contract killers?

With the current trend toward marquee directors producing features with run times pushing and, in some cases, exceeding the three-hour mark, The Killer comes in at an almost compact 1hr 58mins. Yet for a film that speeds along on a core of built in nervous energy, many of its frames are oddly full of calm and stillness. Much of Fassbender’s screen time, and he is in very scene, is spent preparing, stalking, patiently waiting to execute his plan. Even the film’s opening minutes throw the audience right into the tightly wound inaction as The Killer anticipates the appearance of his target.

The all-consuming feeling of ordinariness the film emanates is punctuated by efficient action scenes and staccato acts of shocking violence. The Killer’s downtime is accentuated, with his thoughts open to us through a measured voiceover. The film’s diegetic soundtrack also belongs to him - using a playlist of The Smiths when ‘working’ as if he were simply cleaning or exercising. Fincher and his team have taken the stylised panels of Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon’s atmospheric graphic novel Le Tueur and brought them to visceral life, all dipped in the director’s pitch-black humour.

The World

This is very much a Fincher joint. Whilst The Killer’s preparation and reconnaissance are often conducted in daylight, much of the film’s action takes place at night. From the unfinished office space of the opening scene to the Dominican Republic cab office burglary to the high-end restaurant where The Killer meets The Expert (Tilda Swinton), the film hypnotically emits the sallow greens and yellows synonymous with low level, artificial light. A light familiar to the rotting world of Fincher’s collapsing unnamed city in Se7en (1995) or the Swedish homesteads of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).

Through cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, alongside Cate Adam’s minimalist costume design and Coco Pellissier’s clever set dressing, this light suffuses The Killer’s potentially mundane locations with a sinister, jaundiced pallor. Like the unassuming bars and meeting rooms of Fight Club (1999), the Brownstone in Panic Room (2002) or the car interiors of Zodiac (2007), these everyday places become locations where shocking incidents of violence can and most likely will occur. Fincher’s 1970s set FBI drama series Mindhunter (2017-2019) radiates the same unsettling glow.

There is an apparent dread in Fincher’s work, subtle but growing through every scene until it reaches a shocking apex. Whilst the likes of Se7en and Fight Club continually up the ante to a climax the audience will not forget, The Killer permits its final moments to settle with a seemingly quiet flourish. The Killer allows his ultimate target to go free, under the condition that if he has to return it will be to administer a slow, painful death. As with the surprise return of anti-hero Amy Elliot Dunne (Rosamund Pike) in Gone Girl (2014), what appears to be the softer solution is all the more haunting for it.

The Code

Like the narrator in Fincher’s Fight Club, The Killer lays out a set of rules by which he operates. Fassbender’s delivery of this internal monologue is entirely deadpan, almost comically stone faced as he repeats his mantras, ‘Stick to the plan…anticipate, don’t improvise.’ His method is catalogued across the film’s neatly divided chapters as he meticulously prepares for and then executes each kill. This speaks to Fincher’s fascination with and gift for dramatising procedure, already enthrallingly proven in the investigations carried out in Se7en, Zodiac and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

There are moments where The Killer lures the audience into thinking he might be having some sort of existential crisis. He dishes up global population statistics alongside mainstream pop culture references, diminishing his own small acts and accomplishments. These examinations of futility are followed by the nihilistic ‘I don’t give a f__k.’ With a heinous job he seemingly enjoys and a will fed by financial reward, The Killer fits neatly into a world fuelled by late stage capitalism, a subject Fincher looked at in The Game (1997) and The Social Network (2010) as well as its dissolution in Fight Club.

Fincher’s procedural pictures all contain quests for a killer, with the ‘good’ (detectives, investigators, journalists), looking into the maelstrom of evil to root out the truth. The protagonist of The Killer holds more in common with Amy from Gone Girl than these established heroes. Both Amy and The Killer are smart, methodical, patient and skilled, and display a startling lack of empathy. The Killer states, ‘Empathy is weakness. … fate is a placebo … luck isn’t real, nor is karma.’ Yet it is often these notions which keep an audience engaged with a story, helping to make sense of its significance.

The Competition

Empathy is in short supply in the world of cinematic contract killers, yet an audience must have something to connect them to this world, to make their investment worthwhile. James Bond’s ‘Queen and Country’, Jason Bourne’s memory loss or the revenge very much due to The Bride in Kill Bill or to John Wick, allow us to root for these sociopaths in exchange for being entertained. Conversely, we’re given endless access to The Killer’s thoughts in Fincher’s picture. Outside of his head, The Killer is taciturn and judged only by his actions, his work - surveillance, preparation, execution.

During interviews around the release of The Killer, key cast and crew pointed to the influence of Le Samouraï (1967), Jean-Pierre Melville’s stone-cold classic French hitman thriller. Starring Alain Delon as the trench coated assassin Jef who finds Paris closing in around him after a botched post hit getaway, Melville’s neo-noir lends much to the world of The Killer from its sparse language and tight pacing to its highly skilled protagonist. Both films share the unspoken acceptance of a moral ambiguity and invite, rather than insist, that the audience come along with them. 

Le Samouraï became a modern cult classic and the path from it to Fincher’s film is littered with flicks inspired by its undeniably cool and stylish mood. Whilst full of his trademark balletic action scenes, John Woo’s The Killer (1989) shares several similar story beats with Melville’s picture. Anton Corbijn’s The American (2010) sees a quiet hitman named Jack (George Clooney) hideout in the Abruzzo mountains, pursued by former colleagues. Corbijn’s film plays like a 70s conspiracy thriller, steeped in paranoia, and as such has a deep connection to both Le Samouraï and Fincher’s picture.

That kind of atmosphere is everything in The Killer. A simmering, murmuring score provided by regular Fincher collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; a tightly wound Fassbender, on captivating, paranoid form; the sickly electric light that bathes its everyday settings, all of which combine to unsettle and ultimately amuse. The release of a David Fincher picture is always an event and whilst its cinema release is truncated due to a reduced theatrical window, it is likely The Killer will grow in popularity over time to become a significant entry in the director’s canon.

The Killer released in a limited number of UK & Irish cinemas from 27 October through Altitude and streams exclusively on Netflix from 10 November.

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