The Killer

4 outta 5

The Killer, the latest film by auteur director David Fincher, really likes to show the, oftentimes mundane, process of an assassin for hire. Which means a lot of checking into airports under a false alias, ditching evidence in garbage disposals and glowering. This is broken up by incredibly quick and nasty bursts of violence. As with all of Fincher’s movies, it looks great and the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is discordant noise that heightens the tension. This isn’t exactly the zippiest thriller but it is very immersive. And pairing it with Michael Fassbender’s other recent film, Next Goal Wins, is an interesting way to showcase his range and tonal diversity of his projects. The killer is not a nice guy, but he has not a nice job in not a nice world.

An unnamed killer (Fassbender) is working assassination missions for hire. His current job involves him going to France and mostly hanging out in an abandoned WeWork office and looking out a window with a sniper rifle, waiting for his target. Eventually, the target does arrive, the killer takes his shot and, shockingly, misses. He ditches all his gear and leaves France, only to come home to find that his love was attacked. The goons were sent by his boss, the lawyer Hodges (Charles Parnell), to clean up the killer’s mess. Now the killer must track down everyone involved in the attack, from the goons that carried it out to the clients behind it all, to keep his partner safe.

As his job involves quite a lot of downtime, the killer spends it alone, ruminating upon his thoughts about the world. Which means a lot of voice over narration from Fassbender. The voiceover is a lot of haiku-like ruminations upon the details of his job. At one point he relates statistics about the population on planet Earth and, considering how many people are born each day, the killer’s work wouldn’t have a dent upon it. Because the movie features a lot of Fassbender sitting, waiting, staring, lurking, hearing him talk keeps the audience engaged. Fassbender’s killer character isn’t the most emotionally expressive, so it’s more about subtle reactions which conveys volumes. He even manages to work in slight comedic moments, like in the middle of a brutal fight he reaches into a kitchen drawer and pulls out a useless cheese grater and the look on his face is hilarious.

There are quite a few scenes where the killer gets into chat scenes at gunpoint with various characters, letting an actor be expressive as a mostly silent Fassbender listens. When the killer confronts his boss about why a crew was sent to take him out, it is very tense. Beforehand, there is an extended sequence of the killer sneaking his way into the office, with him counting off the time it takes for the door to close and pulling a gun on the lawyer’s assistant. His boss tersely tells the killer that screwing up the mission was all his fault as Parnell’s character has no sympathy and the killer’s response is a sudden explosion of violence. Later the killer takes the assistant to find more information, and Kerry O’Malley plays the scene as someone who is rightfully terrified as she knows what he is capable of.

One of the most striking scenes is when the killer confronts the goon sent to take him out. The lead up is deliberately meticulous, showing him following the guy around and buying supplies to take care of the very angry dog outside, and his solution involves raw meat and a bunch of sleeping pills. Once inside, the killer has a crazy brawl that is brutally intense. Sala Baker plays the goon and he’s a giant guy, tossing Fassbender’s killer around, as they use all the household items at their disposal. The movie is broken down into sections where the killer will confront a new target, like when the killer talks to an expert played by Tilda Swinton. She immediately knows what is going to happen and becomes somewhat philosophical about her impending fate. Swinton pulls off a remarkable balancing act of sympathetic and devious. A lot of this scene is mostly Swinton talking as Fassbender simply reacts subtly, and the end of it is aces. The final confrontation is the killer meeting the ultra-rich client played by Arliss Howard. When the client reveals he didn’t know what was going on, the killer’s reaction is nicely unexpected.

The Killer takes its time as it is more about slowly drawing the viewer into the film and then shocking them when the violence erupts. The whole first act is like Rear Window where the killer is watching people from a building across the street, which is a visual that would work better in theatres on a big screen than the variable screen size that people watch Netflix on. Basically, a chunk of the first act would look terrible on a phone. This is a movie about a very bad man going about his evil job in a mundane way, but by making it a revenge story it makes him someone whom the audience can root for. It is deliberately paced but the payoff is worthwhile.