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This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labour of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

It’s not hard to see why David Fincher would be a favourite for many young cinephiles, especially when one would know his own style from a body of work that includes Se7en, Zodiac, and The Social Network. With The Killer, a film based on the French comic book of the same name, it seems like Fincher is operating on an entirely different wavelength from what he usually works from. It’s as stylized as you’d expect from any other Fincher piece, but The Killer also feels like it’s giving you a sense of what it feels like to be a part of his own process. It’s a film all about the meticulous nature of everything, and it’s hard not to be at least wrapped into that whole ordeal.

Michael Fassbender stars as the titular “killer,” a hitman who is known for his extreme proficiency upon doing his job. In the first scene of the film, we get a sense of the coda which he lives by – and a sense of how deadening the routine truly is. All of this slowly leads us into what we are led to believe would become a perfect murder, where he would manage to leave the scene of the crime completely undetected. But this fateful near-miss ends up sending him down another path against his against his employers, as he starts battling a personal crisis on this mission. Fincher and Walker work with an episodic structure as this story spans many days and nights across many countries, giving us a new picture of the killer’s supposedly perfect process of stripping away any sense of humanity within himself.

Given the sort of films that David Fincher has made himself known for over the years, as they’ve often been psychological thrillers, The Killer feels like it’s the most self-deprecatory that Fincher has ever been. It’s self-deprecatory in the sense that Fincher works with the film’s episodic structure together with knowing what people have expected from him as a filmmaker over the years, but of course, it’s something that he’s taken so much time to develop. It feels like a close look at the meticulous nature of his filmmaking process, to the point where Fincher sees himself as a wholly deadened version of what we loved him for over the years, even finding humanity in someone who doesn’t see themselves as having so much of that.

But I think it’s also clear that Fincher is at peace with knowing he’s working with an otherwise very flimsy foundation here, even to the point that it shows within the way the action is directed. Nonetheless, the deliberate nature of everything makes it all feel like perfection doesn’t last forever – which is also the crux of the film. Even then, the screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker isn’t the most polished that he’s worked with (although that’d be unfair for Walker, to stand up against the scripts for films like The Social Network or Gone Girl), but Fincher digs into the deep for some sense of morale to be found, as the process of this job only involves him taking them out one by one, and the violence is almost normalized.

Nonetheless, it’s also maybe the most that I find Fassbender has been able to do much on the screen, all of this owing to how he’s playing the titular unnamed killer in a similar manner to Alain Delon in Le Samouraï or Ryan O’Neal in The Driver. Every moment of his actions is perfectly calculated so as to avoid a mistake, and Fassbender plays this part with a distinct coldness that almost makes him look stylish. But it’s clear in that emptiness that Fassbender’s title character is going through that so many years of having nothing but a perfect record have turned him into a machine. In a sense, you’re seeing what might be Fassbender delivering a scary performance on the basis of that alone, but I think that there’s only so much he can show in a role that requires a very deadened version of what would be seen as your usual action hero to the point you feel that emptiness slowly eating him up.

The Killer might not be up to par with David Fincher’s best work, but the way that Fincher continually reinvents himself over the years will always make him one among the most exciting filmmakers to follow. There’s a coldness to the stylized filmmaking that reflects what the process to create perfection can do to someone like Fincher after so many years of being in the field. It also can’t be helped but felt that something like this feels like a reaction to what the studio system would do to many artists like him. It also feels like the appropriate way to tell a story about an assassin whose entire process lies solely on perfection being achieved one way or the other, and the exhausting nature of that line of work.

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Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Netflix.

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Directed by David Fincher
Screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, from the comic book series created by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and Luc Jacamon
Produced by Céan Chaffin
Starring Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Melley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, Tilda Swinton
Running Time: 118 minutes
Release Date: November 10, 2023