The Killer (2023)

Score: 3.5 / 5

A new David Fincher film? On Netflix? With Michael Fassbender? It didn't take much to put The Killer on my awards season watchlist, so I never really knew what to expect. And, now having seen it, I don't really know how to feel. It is at once exactly what I imagined and a bizarre surprise that didn't quite earn my favor. Make no mistake: Fincher is as precise and commanding as he's ever been, and the film is a blessing to behold. It's just a strange story with unexpected tone, and its release exclusively on streaming does it no favors in that regard.

A Fincher thriller about a hitman whose most recent job got botched? Yeah, okay, that tracks. The story of a cold-blooded, calculated assassin who has to reckon with suddenly losing control of his craft? Sounds suspicioiusly personal for Fincher, notoriously exacting in his obsessive creativity. Starring a man accomplished in playing heartless monsters and scary killers? Michael Fassbender has it down to a science. The dramatized perfectionism exceeds the story, adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker (8mm, Sleepy Hollow, The Wolfman, and Se7en), and feels quite at home with both cast and crew, blurring the lines between art and artists. Even when Tilda Swinton shows up, it's less a shock and more a natural bit of casting inclusion; of course she'd be there too, whether you see this as an exercise in coldly precise artists working together or because you see this film as an updated, zhuzhed-up Michael Clayton (which crossed my mind more than once). 

But it's also not what you'd expect because of its odd sense of humor. Granted, part of this may stem from its source material, a French graphic novel series I don't know anything about. The opening sequence is of the nameless protagonist -- Fassbender as the titular professional assassin -- staking out a hotel room and waiting for his target to arrive, and as chilling as it is to watch someone watching for someone, his "method," if you will, involves listening to The Smiths on repeat and justifying his murderous job to us in listless voiceover. The deadpan presentation is helped by the ironic music, to be sure, but also in an almost Ebenezer Scrooge-like means of self-defense via monologue; the killer often keys us into his own justification for being creepy and violent by noting that his actions are infinitesimal compared to the number of people are born and die any given day.

Things become less drily funny when his stakeout ends in disaster. Faced with running and hiding as his only reasonable option, he returns home to find his girlfriend in a bad way, and then he makes a shattering decision. Everything we've learned about him has been planned and calculated, emphasized in his repeated rule to never improvise or get emotionally involved. Suddenly he chooses to make this personal and seek revenge. He embarks on a bloody journey that, while mostly predictable in conventional narrative, remains endlessly watchable due to the cinematic craftsmanship on display by a team working in perfect harmony, harnessing the perfectionist streak of its protagonist and owning that same perfectionism in each aspect of bringing the film's world to life.

Fascinating and beautiful as it all is, it's also hard to connect with emotionally. Maybe we're not supposed to. I'm glad that the film never makes its leading man sympathetic -- I kept expecting some revelation meant to endear us to him -- but his detached approach to murder also saps the film of some of its prurient intrigue. Sometimes you want someone to love or hate more than just vaguely fear. Then again, this isn't a story of feelings. It's a story of someone who so carefully constructs their lives around being perfect and precise who then makes a mistake and has to messily deal with that to protect himself. Again, doesn't it sound a little personal for Fincher? That might also be why its strange tone leans so far into comedy. I was reminded more than once of Steven Soderbergh's filmography, vacillating between riveting dramatic thrillers and crime comedies. This is Fincher's version of the latter, including a running gimmick about the killer's aliases and countless references to name brands (some would say product placement), a curiously bitter commentary on our commodified, consumer culture that keeps us all connected while distracting us from very real threats walking among us.