Methodical. Deliberate. Intentional. Focused. Precise. Unassailable. Unflinching. These traits are essential for any contract killer to succeed in their bloody profession, because when it comes ti taking another person’s life, having the ability to dissociate is critical to getting the job done. These characteristics could also fit the bill for director David Fincher.
Fincher’s meticulous attention to detail is well-documented, whether it’s Mark Ruffalo realizing he’s only “10% of the frame,” Matt Damon recounting a story about an extra whose walking annoyed him so much that it overtook a take during Gone Girl, or the 99 takes of The Social Network. It’s apt then for Fincher’s latest, The Killer which hits Netflix today, to be a film centered around a hired gun whose career is oriented around precision detail. Every little tidbit is planned and executed to the nth degree to create one incredibly well-oiled machine — until it isn’t.
The Killer immediately puts precision on front street, wasting no time showing all the planning and tedium that goes into waiting for the one perfect shot. Michael Fassbender’s unnamed assassin spends the first twenty minutes of the film ushering the audience into the underworld through an unhinged — and ultimately sardonic if you’re a sicko like myself — monologue about how he operates. He dresses like a German tourist because “most people avoid them.” He slunks out to a McDonald’s for a protein fix. He listens to The Smiths in what ultimately becomes the film’s best recurring joke. The tedium is a feature, not a bug, of his profession, which provides plenty of time to justify his deadly actions. After all, as he says to himself, considering the number of people born or dying on a given day, his murders are otherwise just a blip in the grand mathematics of the universe.
The killer hits a blip of his own when his carefully crafted kill goes awry, striking an innocent instead of the intended target. This mistake kicks off a series of events culminating in him returning to his home in the Dominican Republic to find his lover inches away from death, the intended victim of a clean-up crew sent by his employers. The killer’s drumbeat mantras — “Forbid empathy. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight” — quickly go out the window when it becomes clear it’s now personal. What follows is a brutal and bloody descent into hell as the titular character goes killing again, leaving a sizeable body count in his wake.
Outside of the notable connections between the killer’s desire for precision and Fincher’s career arc of doing the same, the storied director loves to take material and elevate it well above its station. Gone Girl was an airport-friendly, beach-ready-read that becomes a dark treatise on the secrets and lies we tell ourselves in marriage. The Social Network made the story of Facebook a gripping Shakespearean tragedy. The Killer is one of the most well-constructed thrillers in recent memory, thanks to Fincher’s palpable passion and his assembly of killer, frequent collaborators: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross on scoring, Seven writer Andrew Kevin Walker, Gone Girl cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, The Social Network editor Kirk Baxter, and Zodiac production designer Donald Graham Burt. Experts in their respective fields, they’re well-suited to partner with Fincher and channel his extreme delieberatness.
Fincher finds a well-suited lead in Fassbender, too. Having played no shortage of notable emotionless killers throughout his career, he finds a lot to dig into as Fincher’s avatar. Audiences are aware of the actor’s inherent intensity, but he mines the depths of the film’s tart tone to an excellent degree. The Killer is hilarious if you’re on Fincher’s wavelength; a third-act stalk involves our nameless lead ordering a fob copier from Amazon (!) for use in his larger scheme. The fact that something relatively innocuous can easily fall into an otherwise menacing use is squarely in the dark comfort zone of someone who believes the entire human race to be “perverts.” Not to mention, the killer’s Smiths playlist hits in such a manner that it ostensibly functions as a punchline to his internal musings.
Fincher’s filmmaking remains stellar. Throughout most of The Killer, the camerawork is as taut and stately as the titular character himself, but there are moments when it reflects how undone he is after his mistake. In a thrilling escape sequence immediately after he botches the kill, Fincher swaps his otherwise steady framing for a hurried, frantic pace that matches our lead’s state of mind. This choice happens a few other times throughout the movie, in sequences that notably show when the killer is otherwise out of his depth and are thusly leveraged to great effect.
In the grand scheme of Fincher’s body of work, The Killer arrives as something that could be viewed as a minor work. I know my first reaction was to view the film as such. But the longer I thought about it, the more it seeped into my brain. That’s the strength of Fincher and The Killer as a whole; even something perceived as “lesser” can worm its way under your skin. So, sure, The Killer isn’t The Social Network — but then again, very few things are. But there’s such a thrill to watching tenures craftspeople working this proficiently that you can’t help but be impressed at what still manages to be a killer result.
The Killer is now streaming on Netflix.
