Review: The Killer

Director:  David Fincher

Stars:  Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Tilda Swinton

One of the best high-level gags of any David Fincher movie occurs at the very beginning of The Killer, which races through a frenetic and dazzling opening credits sequence at breakneck speed before crashing into one of the most hypnotically slow first acts of the director’s career. Dashing a quickly set expectation, one can almost hear him cackling at this collision in the edit. It’s an image of Fincher engendered by the sense that this is him relaxing, letting loose (comparatively), maybe even enjoying himself. It’s infectious. The Killer is as effortlessly watchable as past hits Panic Room and Gone Girl. Nobody cruises quite like this dude.

Said first act is like a mini-film unto itself. Focused. Hermetically sealed. Intimate (in it’s own way). Like a more predatory Rear Window. We’re introduced to Michael Fassbender’s Killer; an assassin camped in an abandoned Paris office space, waiting on his moment. His intended target is a mystery to us, which is fitting as his entire ethos is distance. Don’t get involved. Early in his motormouth narration he describes himself as “Not exceptional; I’m just a part”. Like a cog in a machine, disassociating culpability? Or is it, “apart”, delineating himself from the rest of society. Separate from. Above. Or maybe even below.

As this nameless Killer eagerly articulates for the audience his misanthropic ethos, justifying his deeds by highlighting their grander insignificance, The Killer quickly feels like a genre remix of American Psycho. We’ve heard similar rhetoric from Patrick Bateman. But then Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker makes it clear through variation that we’re dealing with someone slightly different. The Killer’s monologuing embraces cliché and quotation as keenly as Bateman – a kind of square, poorly-read pomposity – but his itemising of the mundane starts to suggest simple loneliness. The Killer is, after all, talking to us. Narration is a fourth wall break. And he likes it. All this chatter belies a fondness for connection that his bluster downplays.

The first chapter of The Killer is such a dream. A mix of beautiful, meticulous craft (that editing!) and Fincher leaning into his own legacy, preferences and kinks. This movie often feels self-referential, dusted with wry acknowledgements. Not Easter eggs. Nothing so glaring. Just wry echoes that link us to Se7en (a paint can), to Fight Club (covert organisations operating in commercial spaces), to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (a flash of S&M), to Zodiac (a Killer in plain sight). Indeed at times this feels like Fincher relishing the opportunity to follow the perpetrator for a change; leaving the dogged cops and journalists out of the equation for once.

The Paris job goes awry, breaking the Killer’s track record and snapping the sense of hermetic control that opens the picture. From here the film starts rolling, quickens, unspools, and starts following a very recognisable template. Fassbender’s Killer wouldn’t like to see it spoken of as a vengeance tale; that’s too emotional. But he becomes a wronged man, working for redress, and to ensure his own survival. It’s terrific fun to engage in. Episodic and familiar, but made whole by Fincher’s evident enjoyment. After the prestige pomp of Mank – technically proficient but flatly forgettable – The Killer feels as nimble as a Soderbergh flex. Like the underrated Haywire, for instance, this is Fincher enjoying an opportunity to play with boilerplate action/thriller tropes.

Fassbender’s been out of circulation for a little while and, as a result, there’s a mild sense of nostalgic throwback to his very presence. He’s played wily sociopaths like this before, so he feels well placed. Fincher largely eschews distracting casting choices for those who cross the Killer’s path, though the middle of the picture is buoyed by the arrival of Tilda Swinton, who helps smooth over a particularly pedestrian patch. She’s always a joy, and her presence here also connects The Killer to another auteur wildcard of assassination intrigue; Jim Jarmusch’s (also underrated) The Limits of Control. So The Killer feels in conversation with a subset of auteur pictures, as well as Fincher’s own back catalogue.

These pleasures make up, perhaps, for the lack of complexity in both plot and character. We only ever get to know a version of the Killer that he presents us. And while this can be inadvertently revealing in ways detailed above, its still as limited as the genre usually allows. And the storyline is, by design, familiar. An exercise (even if the finale plays humorously close to that of P. T. Anderson’s oddball romcom Punch-Drunk Love).

This is a Netflix movie, one of the few generously afforded a brief theatrical window. I STRONGLY urge anyone with a passing interest in the film to make the trip before it lands on the platform. Because the cinema invites complete engagement in it’s beautiful filmmaking and the world shown. Netflix at home, meanwhile, engenders distraction and disengagement. It’s connected to learned behaviours of not really paying attention. Of watching piecemeal and on phones, or not really watching at all. I’m guilty of it. We’re all guilty of it. Do yourself and the work a favour and seal yourself in with it. It glides. It’s a joy to watch, even if it is relatively thin by design. It’s almost good enough to forgive the cancellation of Mindhunter.