I sincerely doubt that the first word that comes to mind when someone summons the name “David Fincher” from the inner reaches of your mind is “funny.” Fincher’s well-beloved by film nerds of all shapes and stripes for spinning gold out of pulp novel premises through austere style, oftentimes prying them from otherwise grating and nigh-unreadable texts – he doesn’t elevate them as much as he perfectly captures the experience of thorough engrossment one has with their plots, which turns Hudson News purchased airplane reads into deplaning reads into wait-in-the-terminal-until-the-end-of-this-section reads and then stay-up-too-late-in-the-hotel reads – and that is a talent that very few folks have as innately as he does. But Fincher’s status as a name-brand auteur enables him to have a kind of distance from his narratives (undermined in the case of Mank, at least) that few filmmakers have: It’s hard to imagine another director having the sort of equal billing with the adapted work in the minds of the audience when bringing a pulp sensation like Gone Girl to the screen. But that assurance of quality is the product of decades’ worth of honed rigor – you don’t make Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, and The Social Network without getting a reputation.
Yet his latest, The Killer, is a continuation of the stylistic alterations that he’s experimented with ever since he signed a deal with Netflix. Mindhunter was an attempt to sustain that feeling over the course of television seasons, Mank was a stylistic exercise that helped to put his father to rest, and Love Death and Robots was an anything-sticks attempt to broaden the purview of what type of animation audiences might watch on streaming. All, with the possible exception of Mindhunter, have proven to be alienating in their own right, and this is no exception. Yet all have found some sort of weird audience, and The Killer’s may prove to attract the broadest in the flock: Nerds like myself who, had this film dropped in the fall of 2011, might have had a hard time choosing between a bucket hat and a scorpion jacket. It is also fucking hilarious, deconstructing similar “cool and collected tough guy” narratives in the same way that Nicolas Winding Refn did in the ‘10s, and will undoubtedly be on my best-of-the-year list.
Based on the bande dessine (soon to be redubbed by the State Department as “Freedom Comics”) by Matz and Luc Jacamon, The Killer opens with a lengthy introduction to the very boring yet supposedly exciting life of our protagonist, played by Michael Fassbender (who will be referred by his name, given that the character lacks one), as he surveils and waits for his latest target to arrive in Paris. Via a punchy yet monotone narration, he monologues to us, at length, about the nature of his work as he prepares his space – a recently closed WeWork, positioned directly across the street from the man’s penthouse apartment – for showtime. He covers, and I am definitely forgetting lots here, the different ways that various cities wake up, the protein-to-cost ratio of the Egg McMuffin, the virtues of having a low heart rate when aiming and readying a sniper rifle, why it makes the most sense to dress as an anonymous German tourist when you’re looking to not be noticed on security cameras, the inconveniently empathetic quality of collateral damage, Ted Williams’ batting average, and the quality that listening to music can have on the sympathetic nervous system.
Of course, he’s a major Morrissey fan (and that is not a joke; 90 percent of the non-Reznor/Ross score here is a selection of Smiths deep cuts), latching on to jangly Marr guitars and Moz croons as a kind of ashwagandha root for the consciously empty soul. But when it’s finally time to get things underway, and he has the man nearly and neatly lined up in the crosshairs with “How Soon is Now?” blaring from his earbuds as the camera surveils the room De Palma-style, he fucks up. An errant movement from another person in the room means that they take the bullet instead, and what was supposed to be a simple job – one without the logistical creativity of poisoning or strangulation – suddenly becomes very complex. Immediately, he and his loved ones (yes, even assassins need to love and be loved) become targets. And when they strike at his off-the-grid hideout in Dominica, he immediately sets out to make sure that they never ever are threatened again.
If one were to spill ink about what sort of modern-day relevance a film like Fincher’s would have, they’d probably cite the fact that Fassbender almost exclusively uses modern convenience to facilitate his wet work. Knowledge is a practical commodity that hasn’t been sucked into the web of venture capital-financed IPO whales: One can order a keyfob cloner off of Amazon, but it’s useless without information that can only be pried from local networks and Rolodexes. If any part of Fassbender’s character is thoroughly skilled, it’s his management and acquisition of information, which requires a personal touch and involvement that everything in his convenience-centric life doesn’t. He eliminates the competition out of a single-minded desire to preserve his own space, a self-regulator when he feels that his security is being imposed. But for all of these suggestions towards a larger immediate cultural meaning, Fincher chooses to go deeper into abstraction, tearing apart the narrative of the contract killer as imagined by fellow austere auteurs like Jean-Pierre Melville, whose influence on the genre with Le Samourai is continually worth examination.
Hence, the Paris opening of the film, when Fassbender is at his most assured, eventually gives way to an America-centric second half, where the brutal legacy of our moral understanding of the ugliness of hitmen – Blast of Silence, Murder by Contract – rears its head. There is a glamor in being someone being shot in their deluxe penthouse before they’re able to get whipped raw by a dominatrix: This is a death that suggests importance. Someone cared enough to kill this person because of who they are, not just because of their role in some greater plan. The Alain Delons of the world have long been in repose: What remains is a mass-produced album cover. It is cheap, it is banal.
Much of the conflict within The Killer is wholly internal, rooted in that banality, even if it’s not as obvious as, say, his vendetta against the money men, handlers, and fellow assassins who are a part of the economic immune response to his failures. It really is a matter of misplaced confidence: Fassbender is hideously self-assured of his own ability to control his emotions in situations in which they would (often understandably) be released, and he perpetually fails at doing so, even if he succeeds in his goals. His mantras about self-control, repeated ad nauseam in the narration, ultimately come to resemble a coping mechanism to mask his own insecurities and lack of depth. His gaunt, vacant visage lacks an imposing presence and, moreover, the authority that the narration claims he possesses. If competence begets confidence and confidence begets cool, Fassbender’s stumbled over the first step and is nowhere near the finish.
Fincher deliberately dresses him down – no tuxedos, no style, just pastels, and a bucket hat – and robs him of that sex appeal, that aerosolized musk of testosterone-assisted violence. He is making him the joke rather than building him up as a kind of deliberately-fashioned anti-hero. That maudlin, withering sense of humor is what separates this from something like Anton Corbjin’s The American: he’s not some stoic badass fixing his rifles up and paying sex workers to leave; he’s fundamentally pathetic, and, weirdly enough, it is fabulously endearing in its own way. His sense of humor is unfailingly bitchy, such as the moment, upon observing three muscle-bound dudes make their way into a Florida casino, where he remarks that “there should be a 30-day waiting period on Creatine.” Much like Drive, it straddles the boundary between making its protagonist iconic and a subject of parody, the paucity of their inner lives at war with their attractive ability to escape tangled webs and be active forces of nature should the moment call for it.
Yet also like Refn, Fincher’s wise enough to surround his blank protagonist with identifiable characters adhering to archetypes: Charles Parnell as his perpetually frustrated handler, Kerry O’Malley as the handler’s presentable secretary, Arliss Howard as the rich man behind the vengeance, and, importantly, Tilda Swinton as one of the perpetrators of the acts against Fassbender’s loved ones. If the opening escape of Drive could exist as its own perfect short film, Swinton’s appearance here is its equivalent, contained in a single dialogue-heavy scene at a restaurant that serves as her last meal when Fassbender shows up to demand his pound of flesh. She is his polar opposite: A bon vivant stacked with bon mots, wishing, witheringly, that she hadn’t been “so good” and indulged in Haagen-Daas from time to time, prying deep inside the assassin’s motive and mindset through anxious humor and heaps of put-upon-yet-subtle appeals to the man she hopes exists inside of the one sitting across from her. It’s an illustration of what he lacks – relationships that at least have the good decency to appear as something less than transactional, a sense of genuine regret for the things that have happened that were out of their control – and it ends on a brilliant note that rewrites the narrative of what came before it.
This is ultimately more impactful than the incredibly badass fight scene that occurs directly before it, where Fassbender is robbed of the element of surprise and forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat with a hitman played by Sala Baker, who was, quite literally, the muscle-bound dude in the Sauron costume in Lord of the Rings (and Peter Jackson didn’t need any depth-of-field trickery to make that dude a giant). It shows him directly for what he is, outside of the confines of his job, and why his wardrobe isn’t as much of a costume as it is an ethos: He is bland on the outside because bland is how he feels on the inside.