The Killer, David Fincher’s new film, an adaptation of a comic book story by French author Matz, suggests a trap already in its title: it’s too easy, too vague, too generic, especially when associated with a director known for “killer” movies. The second hint that perhaps things aren’t so simple comes from the fact that the killer in The Killer, played by Michael Fassbender, is not a serial killer like those in Seven or Mindhunter, someone who kills out of obscure impulses, but a hitman, a professional who kills for money and doesn’t choose his victims. Although he works in a somewhat ritualistic manner, this ritual doesn’t seem to have anything to do with repressed sexual desires, an exacerbated religious morality, or childhood traumas. It’s simply a working ritual, everyday routine, not much different from those the viewers must experience in their daily lives.
This ritual is presented to us in the first scene of the film, in which Fassbender’s character prepares his gun sight in a renovated apartment, overlooking a fancy building in Paris, where we assume his target is located. Accompanying the image throughout the film, we have a voice-over narration from the protagonist, which mainly consists of an extension of this working ritual, a sort of mantra he repeats to himself – perhaps as a way to normalize what he does, to keep his pulse at the necessary limit. The phrases, which could be taken from a rather dubious self-help book (but which one isn’t?), emphasize caution and cynicism: “Stick to the plan”, “Anticipate, don’t improvise”, “Don’t trust anyone”, “Never yield an advantage”, “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight”, “Forbid empathy, empathy is weakness and weakness is vulnerability”, “Each and every step of the way, ask yourself, “What’s in it for me?” While waiting for the right moment – waiting, as he explains right away, is a fundamental part of the job – he observes the street, does yoga, listens to The Smiths, eats at McDonald’s.
Beyond these repeated phrases, the assassin also ruminates on broader moral issues, such as justifications for his actions that we have heard many times before, from Raskolnikov to Hollywood. “Every second, X number of people die,” “There are billions of people in the world,” “Kill or be killed,” “It’s every man for himself,” etc. One in particular, no less clichéd, stands out: “From the beginning of history, the few have always exploited the many. […] Whatever it takes, make sure you’re one of the few, not one of the many.” The phrase implies not only cynicism but also a sense of superiority, probably necessary to carry out his profession.
At first, we assume that this man is exceptional. He is meticulous and speaks with authority about a job that is certainly extraordinary, at least for the vast majority of viewers who are not professional assassins. He claims to have killed many people and presents himself as a top professional. He wants to be one of the few, not the many. Finally, the moment comes to shoot the man he intends to kill, and he misses, hitting a dominatrix who happens to pass in front of the victim.
After this first mistake, he quickly makes another: he returns home. As we will later understand, it was a clear policy of the company he works for that such a mistake would result in reprisals, and he should flee as quickly as possible. Arriving home in the Dominican Republic, he finds his girlfriend almost dead. Her brother informs him that the people who attacked her fled in a taxi; the clue will be his starting point in his new journey of retaliation. Now he must kill everyone he works for, a solution à la John Wick, already expected by the viewer, but with the difference that he doesn’t seem to do it so much out of revenge, but as an assurance for his future – perhaps out of “the need to feel safe,” as he comments in one of his ramblings.
We will soon learn that despite all he claims in the first few minutes of the film, all his actions point to those of an ordinary, even mediocre, man. The film begins with his mistake, and if we indeed observe how he operates in each of the murders that will follow, we will see that there is nothing exceptional about what he does: he dresses as a tourist as a disguise, buys a trash can and a janitor uniform to enter his company’s building, hangs a glass on the door of his hotel room to listen if anyone enters, buys (on Amazon) an electronic lock opener, drugs a dog, etc. The various false names he uses as disguises, all from male characters of American sitcoms, family men, “average Joes,” were already a clue to his true essence. The tourist fantasy, after all, is perhaps not just a disguise, or at least not so distant from his reality.
Similarly, at first, we might wonder, like his girlfriend’s brother, how could professional assassins arrive and flee the crime scene by taxi? But, after all, how else would they get there? If not by taxi, it would simply be by renting a car, as the protagonist does on more than one occasion when we see him at Hertz. Perhaps they could take a more elaborate route, change transportation, walk to the final destination, but why bother when it’s so easy to track them down anyway? If, in The Bourne Identity (2002), the surveillance and connectivity technologies of the contemporary world were depicted as obstacles for the protagonist, condemned to perpetual flight from all sides, here they allow the characters not to have to make much effort to achieve their goals, managing to escape unscathed even with some missteps.
At the beginning of The Killer, the protagonist claims it is “impossible not to be seen in the 21st century”; here, this is not just an obstacle, since it applies to both sides: Michael Fassbender’s character needs to disguise himself and take certain precautions, but it also seems reasonably easy for him – at least compared to the average action movie – to find and kill those he seeks. The Dominican taxi driver who took the assassins to his house, his company’s boss in New Orleans, the administrator of the company that provides him with the identities of the assassins, the two assassins in Florida and New York, and the client in Chicago, whom he ends up not killing.
In each death, the assassin seems to break his commandments in some way. When he goes to his boss, the plan was to delay his death using a nail gun while interrogating him, but the man dies too quickly. Although he can kill without hesitation, he is not entirely able to remain indifferent to others’ suffering when the company administrator asks him not to dispose of her body, so her children can receive insurance, and he complies. He manages to drug the Florida assassin’s pitbull and break into his house, but he is caught off guard by him, and they fight during a long sequence until he manages to kill him. Instead of killing the other assassin (Tilda Swinton) on the street or at her home, he finds her in a restaurant in Beacon, New York, and has to wait to kill her after they leave the street. Finally, when he reaches the top of the pyramid, the client who hired him and started all this, he does not kill him. He simply asks him if he intends to continue pursuing him, accepts his negative answer, and leaves in the same elevator he arrived in, without a mask or disguise. The man is a millionaire, and, as the assassin informs us, “the police’s efforts are proportional to the victim’s wealth.” Back in his paradisiacal home in the Dominican Republic, next to his young scarred girlfriend, he admits to himself and to us that he is not one of the few, but one of the many.
Unlike the typical revenge film, the difficulty of his trials does not increase gradually. The “big boss” is not harder to reach or kill; on the contrary, he is much more vulnerable than the Florida assassin, less articulate than the New York assassin, easier to find than the taxi driver, and less empathetic than the company administrator. This man, who should be the mastermind behind the entire operation, the core of the corporation, the origin of all the barbarity in the rest of the film, is not even fully aware of what is happening. He simply hired a service, and once it went wrong, he accepted the company’s warranty policy, which was to kill the killer, tie up loose ends, and eliminate evidence. Being a millionaire, he can afford to be easily recognizable, order someone’s death, and remain unscathed by the end of the film. This is a luxury that not even the protagonist has, which becomes clear when he kills Tilda Swinton’s character, a discreet and probably careful assassin like him – representative of his “class”. The only people who don’t die in the film, besides himself, are the minority: the client and the target, wealthy in their apartments with large windows and weak security in Paris and Chicago – they don’t need to hide in the Caribbean.
What is most original about The Killer is probably its voice-over narration. The technique itself is far from new, but the way it is employed is becoming increasingly rare in cinema. Because despite the fact that the protagonist of many names discloses his thoughts for us, he never actually reveals his intentions, his stances. He retains an opacity, which we first mistake for cunning, only to be revealed as a farce. We believe in his honesty, since he is being straightforward with us about his illicit activities, when in fact he is simply selling his story. Everything he says is generic information, statistics easily found on the internet. He quotes a line from Popeye, but when it comes to quoting Dylan Thomas, the line is not actually from the poet. He watches television programs like Dateline and Storage Wars. At one point, he mentions the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, a serial killer who murdered 49 women over two decades but couldn’t spell the word “cat”. “But he was careful,” he adds. His case is not much different; there is nothing truly exceptional about what he does, he is just careful – and not even that much, or he wouldn’t be traveling the world and killing his superiors to fix his mistake.
Everything the characters do in The Killer, if not simply common sense, is something we’ve learned from a movie. After all, just as car rentals or online shopping remind us of our own daily lives, characters using disguises, fake names, or delivering long speeches before dying are scenes we’ve seen countless times in cinema. With this, the film is not simply a portrait of “our contemporary world” but also works with the clichés of its genre, although it doesn’t reiterate them enough to be explicitly metalinguistic. The line between a film that comments on the norm and one that reproduces it is a thin one. The danger, in the case of The Killer, is that all of this might go unnoticed, that the film might seem like just another thrill-less thriller about a professional assassin seeking revenge. We could say that the film is cautious and cynical, like its protagonist, and like all of us in this reified world. Would we then have the reified film that we deserve? A product of its time, a “mirror of society”? The idea seems as moralistic as the ending of Seven, where a Fincher still inexperienced in regard to serial killers blames all the evil of his killer on the “filth of the big city.”
The feeling is that this situation could be taken further, explored more deeply. The risk of being misunderstood is already a first step, but the film could go further; it lacks some of what made Showgirls and Starship Troopers enter lists of the worst films of all time. The Killer embraces the caution and cynicism of its protagonist, but what about its mediocrity? This is certainly a more subtle project by Fincher, but at no point here is his competence questioned; on the contrary, subtlety is well received at this point in the filmmaker’s career, a sign of maturity. The filmmaker embraces the on-demand logic, but does he manage to subvert it, like Verhoeven does with Hollywood production or in the parody of fascist military propaganda?
The moment is different, of course, and spectacular productions in Hollywood are now limited to superhero films or other fantastical themes made with CGI. The Killer is a film made for Netflix, which certainly stands out from most of the platform’s productions. You can find it in the site’s catalog under the genres of “drama” and “thriller,” with indications that this film is “dark” and “suspenseful.” It may be suggested for those who watch the popular true crime reality shows. It’s relatively long for an on-demand film, but that’s what the pause option is for. Moreover, as Fincher himself says, Netflix offers him a “quality control” that studios, with all their monetary limitations, and the movie theater, that “damp, smelly, greasy” [1] place, would no longer provide. The convenience of contemporary routine doesn’t stop at Amazon or Hertz; it’s present in the very format of the film’s exhibition. The assassin at least leaves home to kill his victims; the viewer doesn’t even need to do that.
Paula Mermelstein Costa
Notes:
[1] In a recent interview for Le Monde, available here: lemonde.fr/en/culture/article/2023/11/15/the-killer-on-netflix-a-lone-killer-with-a-meticulous-routine_6256017_30.html
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