David Fincher’s The Killer is the epitome of assassin films
Dispassionate, meticulous, and fixated on life’s mundaneness, David Fincher’s The Killer is to assassin films what All the Presidents Men was to documentaries about journalism. For a few minutes, at least, it acts like that. Then, it purposefully drops the ball and spends the next hour and a half in the rafters, wondering why sports were created in the first place.
The first act of the Netflix thriller is almost entirely devoted to one incident, in which the title hitman spends several days staking out a Paris hotel in order to kill a middle-aged man he has no prior knowledge of. “This work isn’t for you if you can’t handle boredom,” he declares, sounding more like he’s giving a sermon than a class.
The Killer played by Michael Fassbender
The only thing he’s murdering in these twenty minutes is time. The Killer, played by Michael Fassbender in a performance that frequently makes the lead character look no different from a statue you may overlook in a hotel lobby, is titled nothing and is left vaguely for most of the movie.
The Killer follows a set of rules just like them
What sets him apart from the main characters of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï is his continuous voiceover that verges on parody. The Killer follows a set of rules just like them: never wing it, always go with the plan, etc. If Fincher hadn’t presented the topic in a surprisingly humorous way, it would have been boring.
For example, the film features multiple situations when Morrissey’s sweet voice plays in the background, contrasting with the Killer’s emotionally detached demeanor in a way that the filmmaker finds hilarious. However, the background score composed by his usual collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is primarily a series of gritty noises made for musical effect.
Recall his attempt at a comparable dramatic irony in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, wherein he turned the notoriously disagreeable Lisbeth Salander into a Happy Meal enthusiast. It’s all quite peculiar. A reaction to his previous work, which has made him infamous for being a meticulous taskmaster and fascinated with deadly individuals.
He meets together with Andrew Kevin Walker, his Seen screenwriter, again through The Killer. Their collaborative endeavor aims to examine historical cynicism and determine whether it was worthwhile. The Killer says to himself before every job: “Forbid empathy, empathy is weakness, weakness is vulnerability.”
The only reason he has lasted this long is because he always keeps a frigid distance. For example, he sees a McDonald’s meal as “ten grams of protein in exchange for one euro.” In contrast, he sees individuals as talking, walking bags of flesh. Despite his acting as though he is in an assassination film, the Killer frequently finds himself at a crossroads in his emotions.
The story only really gets going when he seemingly makes a mistake on a task for the first time in his life. After that, he embarks on a violent rampage against three unremarkable characters who have grown to perceive him as a loose thread that has to be tied off. Tilda Swinton plays one of them in a sequence so deceptive you feel like hitting yourself for letting Fincher manipulate you so effortlessly.
He is aware that you will be searching for purpose amid all the nothingness at this point in the film, and he is the master of cynical subversion. He looks like the Google Chrome incognito mode sign come to life as he does vigorous yoga and rests next to an electric heater at an abandoned WeWork.
“It’s amazing how physically exhausting it can be to do nothing,” he sneers. including with The Smiths soundtrack, there are allusions to other companies, including Amazon, but figuring out what they signify is likely to be, at best, a wild goose chase. Maybe it’s Fincher’s way of emphasizing how available murder and deceit are to the kind of people who might be interested in them?
In contrast to most other films that deal with such a small subject, The Killer doesn’t particularly encourage reflection or analysis. It approaches you, the audience, with the same emotional detachment that its protagonist does the outside world.
Why Fincher would spend his time on something so little at this point in his career is perplexing, considering that at this point in his career, he could theoretically do anything he wants. Although The Killer is expertly directed, as always, it is ultimately a meaningless movie about the meaninglessness of life, which may not be what most viewers would desire from a polished assassin thriller.
