David Fincher Misses His Shot with The Killer

The title assassin in David Fincher’s The Killer, which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, is a modern sort of death machine. He uses Amazon, has a complicated relationship with Airbnb; he’s seen the show Storage Wars. He even takes advantage of contemporary industry collapse: when we first see him on a job, he’s staked out in an abandoned WeWork space. It’s all a joke, at least in the arch, dismayingly airless confines of Fincher’s film.

Perhaps the thinking was that Fincher could return to the wry, coolly anarchic comedy of Fight Club, another grim movie that took aim at the banal trappings of quotidian American life. But the gag feels stale this time around; its references need an update. (Maybe the killer could get his assignments via TikTok?) That wouldn’t matter so much if the film balanced out its commentary with exhilarating suspense—of which Fincher is more than capable. A few moments in the film do get the blood up, but otherwise The Killer is curiously inert, its wheels spinning with little traction.

The hit man of concern is played by Michael Fassbender, slender and wolfish. He narrates much of the film, laying out his character’s simple rules for success: stay on task, don’t get tripped up by anything so pesky as empathy, make sure your heart rate is at a manageable level. We’re told he’s meticulous, that he’s a highly paid pro at the top of his clandestine field. But we don’t really see it. The film opens on a Paris sniper assassination gone wrong; a bystander catches the bullet and the killer, who goes by many names, has to go on the run.

Or, well, sort of on the run. No one seems to be chasing him after the film’s opening salvo. Maybe that was an effort to keep the narrative lean, but it direly lowers the stakes. Because the killer failed, something like an insurance policy kicks in and an attempt is made on his life. But they get to his girlfriend (or something?) instead, at the luxe home the killer keeps in the Dominican Republic. She survives but is pretty beat up, and thus the killer embarks on a mission of revenge, or at least a mission to make sure such an attack won’t happen again. He’s pursuing, but no longer pursued.

Fincher’s film is episodic, broken up into chapters, each of them comprising one leg of the killer’s retribution tour. Fincher’s keen command of cinema physics—how things move toward the camera, or glide across the frame—is evident throughout. Still, the film is frustratingly understated, holding back just when we think (or hope) that the movie is going to burst into action. One might call this admirable restraint, a seasoned master opting for finesse over flair. But I selfishly wanted more pop, more directorial preening. After the respectable period stateliness of Mank, I was hungry for the dark dynamism of Fincher’s earlier work.

Here and there, The Killer delivers. There’s a bracing, clever fight scene in a house in the Florida nighttime, a brawl of guns, fists, and household implements. It must have taken days to film, because of its many technical requirements and because of Fincher’s famous proclivity for retakes. The final product is stunning, a grimy pas de deux that Fincher ends with a blunt bit of punctuation. That is an interesting, and persuasive, aspect of the film: its frequent reminders that death is not innately operatic, does not usually leave room for poetic final words or pithy send-offs.

Though, there is a talky delight of a sequence involving Tilda Swinton, a dreadfully charged conversation over drinks at a restaurant that brings the film closest to purpose. The clunkiness of Andrew Kevin Walker’s script, adapted from Alexis Nolent’s graphic novel, suddenly gives way to elegance. Swinton is, as ever, alluring and surprising, a sharp and sophisticated jolt of electricity. In some ways, this is a cruel tease. We pine for a different movie, one that’s more focused on Swinton’s character, or that follows her and Fassbender going about their nefarious work in tandem or opposition. But, this is a film of vignettes, so nothing gold can stay. Swinton states her case, and then Fassbender’s laconic avenger is off to the next checklist item, and to the film’s eventual petering out.

Perhaps the movie’s anticlimax is deliberate, Fincher attempting to subvert our hit-man movie expectations, making us question our blood lust. Whatever its justifications, the film is terse to a fault, in a way that feels almost like an aggression toward the audience. Fincher knows that we know what he can do when he really gets going, but he denies us that pleasure—the cerebral kind and the more base. The Killer is an experiment in economy whose results are lesser than the effort put in. Calculating efficiency is all well and good, but at least some life is required to make meaning of all of this killing.