Across the road from a luxurious Parisian hotel, a contract killer (Michael Fassbender) watches his target (Endre Hules) as he entertains his mistress (Monique Ganderton).  Lining up the shot, he pulls the trigger, but the woman moves unexpectedly into the path of the bullet, foiling the assassination.  Fleeing the scene and retreating back to the United States, he learns that his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) was attacked as retaliation and an effort by Hodges (Charles Parnell) to make things right with the Client (Arliss Howard).  The Killer then embarks on a cross-country journey through a secretive network of high-powered and influential people to enact revenge on the Client. 

Continuing his output with Netflix, David Fincher directs The Killer adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker from the graphic novel by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon of the same name.  A buzzy premiere at Venice that garnered Fincher with a nomination for the Gold Lion and netted Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross the Premio Soundtrack Stars Award for their score all helped to stoke excitement for what promised to be a return to form from Fincher ahead of its limited theatrical and subsequent streaming release in early November.  The 118-minute thriller has all the hallmarks of quintessential Fincher, namely its handsome and meticulous assembly that washes the grit and grime of the underbelly with an alluring light, but without the compelling engine of story that kept his earlier thrillers chugging along, The Killer feels more like an experiment in style without a clear goal in mind. 

Fassbender is our entry into the world of contract killing as he waxes poetic about the weight of boredom that will crush even the most resilient of people, splitting the populous into the “few” and the “many,” and stating that this line of work is reserved for the few.  Voiceover is not a new addition to Fincher’s tool kit, but like much of The Killer, its use here is seemingly to see just how far he can take it and keep audiences on the hook.  Fassbender, therefore, has – to take a very unscientific approach and list off a gut reaction as fact – somewhere in the neighborhood of 75-80% of the spoken word in the film, much of it delivered as a monologue.  His soothing voice works well, and he has a wide range in his timbre so that this “So You Wanna Be an Assassin” training tape script remains far more interesting and entertaining than an actual HR-sanctioned video would be, secondarily aided by his ability to deliver the deadpan humor of the script with far more accuracy than his character has behind the trigger. 

Split into chapters corresponding to each new city that his escape takes him, it unfortunately never reaches that same ticking time bomb quality of the opening scene in Paris.  There is no danger or allure once the Killer is back on US soil, and the episodic nature of it all really bogs the film down.  Towards the middle, however, when he confronts Hodges and Dolores (Kerry O’Malley), his administrative assistant, the film begins to tease at something more exciting again as the Killer is taking an active role instead of just passively traveling from place to place.  We begin to learn the code that Hodges used to keep his contracts both secret and in order, but as soon as the Killer has the names and locations of the two who attacked his partner, he is off again to another isolated city to engage in another isolated confrontation.  Even the finale against the Client – what the entire film has been building towards – exists in a vacuum.  This world is of course very different from that of say John Wick in which he is facing off against an entire underground crime ring, but this more mano y mano approach leaves much to be desired and Fassbender operates with an ever-cool suaveness that does not inspire excitement with the audience because we never feel he is in any true danger. In development since 2007 but not shot during the tail end of 2021, COVID protocols certainly had their effect on the staging of this film, but even on a scene-to-scene basis, it lacks both urgency and complexity as the chapters feel so segregated that they do not build towards something larger. 

These format choices are also possibly due to Fincher’s increased work in TV as of late, and while it is not a sign of the director losing his touch, it is a sign of an evolving sense of pace. This change is further shown in the blunt product advertising that is achingly present throughout the narrative. Maybe the lack of subtlety about it can be seen as part of the joke, but it falls flat as it plays out far less nihilistic than the “burn it all down” thesis of Fight Club (1999). The idea behind it works as The Killer almost seems to be an apology from Fincher for fueling a subset of society who are perpetually online and who have molded their personalities after the brash Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). Sharing a similar color palate, it would not be hard to imagine certain Reddit boards salivating at the thought of new material to misunderstand and misconstrue as they make their misogynistic memes but the revelations about the Killer reveal him to be a nobody. A loser. A part of the many. In this way, The Killer works as an indictment of that part of our culture, but none of this is pointed enough to really leave its mark and make us engage with it on a meaningful level. 

Taking that idea and looking at it from an angle – The Killer as a response, a summarizing statement, about the director’s bold and storied career to this point, this time swapping in Fincher himself for Fassbender’s character – is also a rich interpretation, thought it similarly feels wobbly. Since it ends with the Killer being revealed to be just part of the many, one can infer that it is outing the director as a fraud. Perhaps this is a demon that Fincher faces in private, and who are we to say how the commercial and critical success that he has received has weighed on him, but the film also does not feel like the capstone work that these statements are normally reserved for. 

Further and finally, the most damning thing about The Killer is that it just does not make sense when looking at what is put on screen. Fincher is not the only person who could have adapted this graphic novel, but The Killer is a film that only Fincher could have orchestrated. All of this, however, points out a glaring flaw in the importance we place on auteur theory. Fincher often adapts so the core of the stories are not necessarily originating from within him but rather filtered through his worldview. He also has a murders row of frequent collaborators on his projects and The Killer finds him reunited with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, editor Kirk Baxter, production designer Donald Graham Burt, in addition to Reznor and Ross among others. Maybe we are searching for meaning and connections in unrelated works – his characters do not “share a universe” in an overarching or even tangentially related larger picture – so maybe The Killer is a mean-spirited joke levied against those who have followed his career who will still instantly look at this latest as a culmination of everything that came before it or at the very least try to suss out what drew him to this material. To be nice, watching The Killer is like experiencing the frustration of putting in the last piece of a puzzle and realizing it belongs to a different set and therefore does not fit. To be equally mean-spirited as any interpretation of this film seems to be, however, it’s a weak, shallow, and hollow effort, an experiment in style that is pushed to its most extreme limits, thereby forgetting to tell a story or sharpen its thesis.