Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Killer’ on Netflix, David Fincher’s Anti-Emo Procedural Assassin Thriller, Starring Michael Fassbender

David Fincher directs Michael Fassbender in The Killer (now on Netflix), and the only thing to say is HELL YES. Working again with Seven scripter Andrew Kevin Walker, the stylistically austere director follows up the why-is-Fincher-making-a-movie-about-movies movie Mank with a story that seems to better fit his bleak methodology: an adaptation of a French graphic novel about a nameless assassin who finds himself in a classic hunt-or-be-hunted situation. The killer kills and strategizes and hops from country to country and waits and waits and waits for the right time to strike, just like many professional liquidators we’ve seen before. But when Fincher directs one of these guys, it’s inevitably different, right? Let’s find out.

THE KILLER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Who the f— dresses this guy? Khaki floods, bucket hat, Hawaiian shirt, amber shades – dork city. But that’s surely intentional, because everything this guy does is intentional. Precise. Meticulous. Premeditated. Calculated to a couple dozen places past the decimal point. Maybe, just maybe, like the work of a certain famous filmmaker. This guy has no name that we’re aware of, so we’ll just call him “this guy”; he surely prefers that anyway. He’s played by Fassbender with an alarmingly small amount of body fat. He’s an assassin. As cold-blooded as they come. Dudes with ice in their veins put a finger on this guy’s jugular and go brrrrrr. 

This guy narrates his way through a stakeout in an empty, half-finished WeWork office (yes, you may laugh at that) where he watches Rear Window style as Parisians go about their business on the streets. As he waits for his target to park in the hotel across the way, he does yoga stretches, takes naps and voiceovers about how the true difficult part of this gig is enduring boredom, and how you’re lucky if you never meet him, and how he uses music to help him focus. Specifically, that of the Smiths, whose famous refrain of “I am human and I need to be loved just like everybody else does” has likely never been deployed with such irony.

Getting your pulse down to around 60 is the best means of compensating for a bullet passing through a pane of glass, although he doesn’t explain why – it lowers the margin for error, I guess. The target finally arrives and this guy puts on gloves and administers eyedrops and fires up Morrissey and Marr and shoulders his sniper rifle and gets to work on his heart rate. Breathe, breeeeathe, breeeeeeeaaaaathheee – that’s the yoga working for him. More irony! Trigger. Squeeze. The bullet hits not the target but the target’s hired dominatrix. Whoops. Uh oh Spaghetti-os. “Well. This. This is new,” this guy deadpans. The imprecision of humanity bites eventually, doesn’t it? We’ve all shot and killed the wrong person at some point in our lives, METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING OF COURSE. Pobody’s nerfect!

He’s prepared for a getaway, though. Of course he is. He throws this piece of evidence in the trash and steals a moped and throws that piece of evidence in the river and checks into a hotel under one of his zillion fake names – not Ruben Kincaid or George Jefferson, but those come later in this story – and orders room service and sets a glass on the doorknob and places an aluminum cover beneath it (all the better to hear the crash) and grabs the steak knife and settles in for a long night’s sit. He flies to the Dominican Republic – “the hideout,” as a title card tells us – and finds his deep-in-the-jungle home has been broken into. His girlfriend is in the hospital, alive. This is also new. See, you screw up your hit, and your contractee hires a cleaning crew, the members of which are scattered hither and yon, not easily found, but this guy has his ways, boy howdy. He has his ways.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Killer makes one think Fincher would’ve cut the dog out of the John Wick screenplay. 

Performance Worth Watching: Fassbender is as steely as ever (see also: Prometheus), although his usual charisma feels a touch muted. That leaves us praising Tilda Swinton for her drop-in supporting role as a character known only as The Expert, who cultivates the film’s funniest moments as she stares down the barrel of her mortality. 

Memorable Dialogue: “One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. Three-one-thousand. Four-one-thousand. Five-one-thousand. Six-one-thousand. Seven-one-thousand.” – this guy

Sex and Skin: A far-off long shot of a couple humping on a couch.

Our Take: Is this a story about self-preservation or revenge? This guy would insist it’s the former, because frostyheart sonsabitches like him make sure everything is always 100 percent business. And that’s where the tale of this stone-cold killer mirrors the work of Fincher himself, who’s known to soup-to-nuts micromanage his films until all the earnestness is leached from them. Such is the irony of The Killer, which travels all the way around the world from impersonal to personal; it could be interpreted as the filmmaker’s fear of imperfection. Which of course is an inevitability. For a guy who tries not to be human, he still makes mistakes like one. This guy, of course. Nobody’s saying Fincher’s inhuman, although he’s made plenty of movies about killers, and one about something even worse, namely, Facebook.

Beyond any conjecture about Fincher’s self-reflection, though, The Killer is a bit thin. It moves with a merciless flow as this guy methodically makes his way from one mark to the next, narrating no-future nihilistic stuff like “the only life path is the one behind you” with such an emotionally parched sensibility, we can’t help but laugh. Fincher makes sure Fassbender puts the dead in deadpan as he plays the character amoral all the way down to the molecules in his marrow. Unlike most movie characters of this ilk, who inevitably show chinks in his armor, this guy has none; he doesn’t drink the painkillers straight from the bottle and chew, he swallows them like a damn normal person. “Forbid empathy” is part of the mantra he repeats to himself when he needs to surgically scalpel anything resembling sentiment from his M.O. There’s a moment when he has a corpse in a recycling bin and some power tools, and stony-toned “jokes” about measuring twice and cutting once, which has us fearing what his version of righty-tighty/lefty-loosey might be.

So there’s no getting in this character’s corner, really; this is a story of bad people killing other bad people (and here it’s worth noting that some bad people are funnier than others). Although Fincher composes a blistering hand-to-hand fight scene that inspires in us a mighty clench, The Killer is more procedural than action film, driven by a character who essentially insists he’s not a character at all. Fincher’s eye for detail is as fastidious as ever, and that’s potent fuel for the film’s engine. But I was surprised by the film’s lack of tension and stakes; it’s a revenge story with little to engage us beyond perhaps a lightweight deconstruction of hitman sagas or psychoanalysis of the filmmaker and his storytelling rubric. It’s an occasionally amusing, meticulously crafted intellectual exercise, for better or worse. 

Our Call: The Killer is ultimately Minor Fincher, which of course is better than Major Lots of Other People. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.