David Fincher will know that many reviews of his excellent new thriller – premiering in competition at Venice International Film Festival – will make early mention of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï. Featuring Alain Delon at his stoniest, that 1967 film offered us a hitman shut off in his own existential isolation.
The slick, gripping opening of The Killer makes it clear that our unnamed protagonist (not quite hero) takes a very modern approach to his nihilism. Michael Fassbender’s breathy narration suggests nothing so much as a self-help book. “Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Forbid empathy.” All that will, apparently, lead to “success”. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Murders. Awaken the Hitman Within. Those sorts of things.
Anyway, our hired killer is waiting for the right opportunity to take a shot at some wealthy vulgarian on the other side of a Paris street. He sits in the upstairs floor of a disused property with only a sniper rifle for company. Sadly for his professional pride, the job goes wrong, and after violent repercussions catch up with his associates, the killer sets out to mop up the mess in the most dispassionate manner imaginable. The journey takes him to the jungles of the Dominican Republic and back to various points of a corrupted United States.
Adapted from a graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and Luc Jacamon, this Netflix production doesn’t work too hard at shaking its eponymous operative’s cold faith in procedure. There are hints he may soften. But it would be as well not to expect any great wave of redemption. Fincher looks to be wondering if he can engage an audience with a character who is little more than a walking matrix of practical principles.
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No question. Indeed, though it doesn’t have the complexity of Zodiac or the resonance of The Social Network, this may be Fincher’s sleekest and most uncomplicatedly entertaining film of the current century. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score throbs with a mechanical efficiency that echoes the killer’s own businesslike approach. Erik Messerschmidt’s camera sops up the colours of the locations as eagerly as it embraces confounding darkness for late action sequences.
You couldn’t exactly say that Fassbender – stepping away from his motor-racing commitments for two hours – grasps the opportunity to do as little as possible with relish. The performance is too icy to accommodate that final word. But he meets the challenge with admirable commitment. There are a few brief outbreaks of compassion, but this is a human happy to embrace the ethos of a machine.
Fincher allows a strain of anthracite humour to run throughout the drama. The closest thing the killer has to a jocular side is his apparent obsession – and “obsession” really is the word here – with the music of The Smiths. He plays songs by Manchester’s finest miserabilists at every opportunity and never allows tracks by anyone else.
How Soon is Now rather suits an assassination attempt. Elsewhere, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and Shoplifters of the World Unite struggle to blend neatly into a suave, Continent-hopping tale of glamorous assassin not enjoying exotic resorts. That is, of course, the joke. Cuter still is a hugely violent brawl that begins (before the telly gets smashed) to the strains of Fiona Bruce on some lifestyle show or other.
For all its grimness, The Killer is, indeed, something of a big joke throughout. It is a moral tale in which nobody satisfactorily addresses any moral quandaries. It is an action flick taken up mainly with practical logistics. When Tilda Swinton appears, we can reasonably expect that underlying implied wit to poke through the surface, and so it proves. Her efforts to bounce a metaphorical ball off the killer’s brick wall of a persona confirms her as a master of the extended cameo.
The film offers confirmation that Fincher may be at his best when connected most closely to genre. Zodiac and Seven were essentially detective stories, and both were close to perfect. The ambition of Mank led ultimately to pretentious muddle. The Killer allows him to exercise his own perfectionist instincts in a raw entertainment that makes a virtue of its emotional distance.
It may prove to be Fincher’s first self-help film. The protagonist advises himself to live by the initialism WWJWBD? That’s “What would John Wilkes Booth do?” Expect to see that as a tattoo.
The Killer is due to be released in cinemas in October and on Netflix on November 10th
