The Killer returns David Fincher to his cynical roots, and what a glorious return it is
The Killer. // Courtesy Netflix
It’s easy to see why David Fincher would be drawn (sorry) to adapting the French graphic novel The Killer, a passion project of his for the last decade, into a film that hits Screenland Armour this Friday for a brief theatrical run before landing on Netflix.
The film is a story about process and professionalism, topics both frequently associated with the notoriously meticulous director. Its criminal underworld setting easily lends itself to the dreary browns, sickly yellows and greens and clinical whites and grays which define Fincher’s preferred color palette. Looking at the original illustrations for the comic, you can see how they’d fit Fincher’s proclivities like a pair of black nitrile gloves.
We meet Michael Fassbender’s Killer (we never learn his real name, only his chain of aliases), an assassin-for-hire, on a job in Paris, where he’s holed up in an unused WeWork space waiting to take out his target. We don’t know the target’s name, or what he’s done to wind up in Fassbender’s crosshairs—as our protagonist tells us via his oft-repeated personal code, none of that matters to him. When the job goes sideways, Fassbender returns to his hideout only to learn it’s been compromised. Now he must find out who issued the kill order and take them out before he ends up dead.
In some ways, The Killer is a welcome return to form, with Fincher reteaming with Se7en scribe Andrew Kevin Walker. It’s also a fairly cynical tale, a welcome turn back from the sentimentality of Mank, a movie that was a technical marvel, but owed much of its vibe to the script by Fincher’s late father Jack. It’s great to see Fincher working in glorious, icky color again, and to get a similar inner monologue to Fight Club and Gone Girl that expresses our lead’s perceived separation from the world, only to find that he’s inextricably part of it.
The Killer. // Courtesy Netflix
In others, however, this represents an interesting departure for Fincher. The Killer is a tight, spare film with none of the detailed, immersive sets of Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Its minimalism owes much to movies like Stephen Soderbergh’s lean action thriller Haywire. It owes even more to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, from which The Killer takes everything from its spartan aesthetics to Fassbender’s detached efficiency and ever-present hat. The fact that the Killer’s headwear and windbreaker is notably lamer than Alain Delon’s famous fedora and trenchcoat combo plays like a sly joke that you can’t realistically be a fashion icon and a successful assassin, since the point is not to stand out.
The Killer feels like a style exercise more than anything else, and it’s a successful one. That may make the film seem slight, and to be fair, it’s much more stripped down than Fincher’s longer, hyper-researched work. At just short of two hours, it’s also his shortest film since Panic Room. But don’t let that fool you. Just like the films that inspired it, there’s much more going on beneath the surface than The Killer’s unflappably cool exterior suggests.
