By: Lila Anderson & Edu Kenedi
Edited By: Mustafa Ahmad
David Fincher’s newest movie, The Killer, follows Michael Fassbender as a hitman whose life is thrown into disarray after a failed assassination. The Netflix-financed film was initially released in select theatres in October before joining the streamer’s library on November 10th. This unique release structure prompted your two favourite critics to watch the movie separately, one in the cinema and one on Netflix at home.
Edu’s Take: “Netflix and Kill”
My viewing experience began with an alarm waking me at 7:00 am. By 7:15, I had made myself a pot of coffee (black, no sugar), gotten back into my bed, and fired up The Killer on Netflix. In some ways, I think that this approach allowed me to mirror the titular character’s sociopathic tendencies. A short two hours later, I got out of bed, showered, and went about the rest of my day.
The first and strongest impression of the movie was that I was in the hands of a master director. You can tell that every frame and every decision in the filmmaking is intentional. The movie looks cold and sleek, a hallmark of Fincher’s fastidious perfectionism and directorial style. Even the ritualistic motions that the protagonist goes through in preparation for a hit are obsessively precise.
The camerawork in the film is also masterful. Whether we languish voyeuristically as Fassbender observes his targets’ routines or rush through perfectly sequenced chase and fight scenes, the director can focus the viewer’s attention exactly where he wants it. One scene that stuck in my mind was Fassbender’s escape through night-time Paris. Fincher demonstrates his abilities, ratcheting the tension with quick cuts and close-up tracking shots, putting the audience in the protagonist’s anxiety.
The unreliable narrator is another of Fincher’s hallmarks deployed in The Killer. In this case, the whole movie is narrated by and follows the POV of Fassbender’s character. While the voice-over repeats the killer’s mantra, “Forbid empathy, empathy is weakness, weakness is vulnerability,” his actions convey the opposite, showing a man whose quest for revenge is rooted in empathy. This juxtaposition adds depth to a character who initially seems as cold as the bodies he leaves behind.
The final Fincher-ism that stood out to me was the use of humour, whether in Fassbender’s deadpan and near-wordless performance or the knowing mockery of consumer culture and capitalist institutions.
My biggest problem with the film comes from the very platform it is on. While Fincher’s touch is immediately apparent, the extent of his genius only comes out in multiple viewings. To this end, being able to rewatch it on Netflix is great. At the same time, many of these details are hard to discern on a small screen, creating a paradox. For example, the extended night-time fight sequence in Florida was dark and difficult to follow as I watched it at home. Ultimately, The Killer is a film full of small details, though its real depth may only reveal itself on rewatches at home, which fail to do Fincher’s craftsmanship justice.
Lila’s Take: “Profound emptiness”
If I’m going to watch a hitman film that leaves me feeling dead inside, I’d prefer to do it as I watched The Killer: alone in the theatre on a rainy afternoon, feasting on buttered popcorn in the back row.
Watching the film as God and David Fincher intended delivered the right hit of hedonistic pleasure. The opening scene in which we meet Michael Fassbender’s hitman uses the cinema’s surround sound to especially great effect, as visual and audio shift seamlessly from the viewer’s POV to the killer’s. His crosshairs hover on sleazeball billionaires in an apartment nestled under the Pantheon in Paris. Then everything goes sideways.
The shock and fear of the killer’s subsequent revenge slays hit hardest when the sounds are deafening and the figures are larger than life. My escape into the killer’s solipsistic journey could only have been so complete in a dark cinema.
In Fincher’s latest, you can relive the beloved bro-eyness of Fight Club, including its on-the-nose critique of capitalism. Visiting the pod where he keeps bone saws, fake IDs, and garbage cans, the killer imagines his own macabre episode of Storage Wars with glee. His job might be giving him a bit of an identity crisis, too – in fact, we don’t know his name, a personal void teased by the series of aliases on his credit cards. He’s an atomized mercenary, an amoral McKinsey-style killer who can hit his KPIs from anywhere there’s a WeWork. The Gen-X vibes are strong thanks to the killer’s all-Smiths playlist, which forms a surprisingly twee soundtrack for the movie.
In short, I was well-entertained by the witty stream of consciousness and the sporadic spasms of violence, much like the Nyquil-laced meatballs the killer tosses to sedate the feisty bulldog of one of his enemies.
So what makes me say that I felt empty exiting the cinema? It’s something I often take issue with in screenplays adapted from novels, in this case, the French graphic novel Le Tueur.
Even knowing that Fincher is styling the killer as an unreliable narrator, I felt the “chapters” of the film rendered it excessively episodic. Adversaries were introduced just minutes before they were dispatched, like the caricatures of a brutish thug and a pithy ice queen.
Further, the protagonist’s motivation, or lack thereof, made the film feel frictionless. He’s avenging an attack on his lover, who is featured long enough for us to know she’s adequately beautiful and pure of heart. But the killer, whose internal monologue shows a man obsessed over a clean job, never shows the tender side of himself, the part of him that is supposed to drive his bloodthirsty rampage. I suspect this disconnect is a casualty of the adaptation process, that the killer’s emotional effect was lost in translation from page to screen.
All in all, a day at the movies spent watching The Killer, by a director who knows how to make the silver screen work for him, scratches the moviegoer’s itch. But for me, the plot lacked sufficient motivation and unity to make it truly great.