A Movie About the Perils of Being a Control Freak
David Fincher’s The Killer is a darkly funny look at a cold-blooded murderer’s tedious daily routine.
“Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise.” This mantra, repeated in voice-over throughout David Fincher’s new film, The Killer, is a meditative refrain for the film’s unnamed assassin protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender), a reminder to keep calm no matter how intense the circumstances. It’s also the kind of brusque sentiment about homicide that one might expect from a Fincher character, given the director’s reputation as a methodical and detail-oriented storyteller who has made multiple movies about cold-blooded murderers. The Killer initially presents itself as a procedural of sorts, a step-by-step explanation of the practice and discipline that go into being a hit man. Except every time the hit man reminds himself to “stick to the plan,” it means that something is about to go epically, comically wrong.
The Killer is Fincher’s second film project for Netflix, where he’s worked almost exclusively in recent years, spearheading television series such as House of Cards and Mindhunter and garnering a slew of Oscar nominations for the biopic Mank. The subject matter of The Killer certainly seems more traditionally Fincherian, taking him back to the crime thriller and reuniting him with the screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Fincher’s breakout hit Seven and here adapts a French comic book. But although The Killer is a crisply told piece of pulpy neo-noir, it also has an element of self-parody to it, laying out a consummate professional’s precise process and then dashing it into chaos at every chance.
It strikes me that Fincher, who’s notorious for his insistence on dozens of takes and minute control over every visual element of his movies, has been poking some fun at his artistic reputation in recent years, something any great auteur is entitled to do. His Netflix show Mindhunter was a chilling procedural about the FBI agents who drew up the first profiles of serial killers, but it was also a reflection on how delving into such upsetting narratives, as Fincher has throughout his career, might be a recipe for madness. Mank told the story of the genesis of Citizen Kane, one of the most totemic technical achievements in cinema history—but it backgrounded the director Orson Welles and focused instead on the mercurial screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, celebrating the ornery scribes working behind the supposed master filmmaker.
Now comes The Killer, which casts the sinewy and silent Fassbender as an unempathetic contract killer who works alone and claims that his fearsome reputation is thanks to a strict routine—he won’t even fire a bullet unless his heart is beating fewer than 60 times a minute. If anyone can get into the head of such a perverse creature, it’s Fincher, who has explored the art of murder in films including Zodiac, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl. But in The Killer, he’s just as interested in the tension and outright comedy that comes with totally losing control—perhaps our killer’s worst nightmare, and something he’s forced to reckon with over the course of the movie.
The opening sequence of the film sees the (never-named) protagonist camped out in an abandoned Parisian WeWork, waiting for his target to return to a sumptuous apartment across the street. Fassbender is styled with hilarious insouciance, all bucket hats and yoga clothes; as his character puts it, he dresses like a German tourist, in the hope that he’ll be left alone whenever he walks the streets. The first scene is entirely driven by a long, involved bit of narration as the killer lays out every dull step on the way to firing his gun, from cleaning every part of his sniper rifle to loading more Smiths songs onto his MP3 player, almost teasing the audience with how plodding and unemotional his approach is.
But then something ends up going surprisingly wrong, of course, and the real story is off to the races as our “hero” tries to clean up a mess he’s made. He runs afoul of rival assassins, former colleagues, and endless logistics, trotting the globe in an effort to ward off trouble that keeps coming from every direction. As much as he advises himself not to, he almost entirely improvises his actions in the film, as Fincher and Walker dig into the bizarre minutiae of life on the run as a hit man. (Put it this way: The killer rents a lot of storage lockers filled with more fake passports than Jason Bourne ever owned.)
As a thriller, it’s unpredictable, engaging, and constantly inventive, letting every new set piece unfold in some unusual manner—a brutal fistfight with one opponent might be followed by a terse conversation over dinner with another. A procession of wonderful character actors marches through to match wits with Fassbender, with a preening Charles Parnell (as his bow-tied employer) and a delightfully frosty Tilda Swinton (as an expert peer) serving as standouts. Through it all, there is a real emotional arc as Fincher investigates the addictive nature of such a strange lifestyle, one the killer could have retired from years ago. But the director is also undoubtedly prodding at himself as well, laying bare the insecurities and hidden strengths of the supposed control freak before setting him on the road to triumph.