Movie Review : The Killer (2023)
David Fincher became a Hollywood legend for a very particular kind of pleasure. An unmistakable brand of cerebral, but accessible action thrillers that engage body and mind into a vivid experience. His last home run was the adaptation of Gillian Flynn's excellent novel Gone Girl in 2014, before Donald Trump's presidency, which might as well be eight thousand years ago. While I can't say his new movie The Killer knocks it out of the park, I thought it was a nice return to form for titan from a less self-aware era in culture.
The Killer tells the story of a stereotypical, albeit philosophically inclined hired killer (Michael Fassbender) who botches a job in Paris and comes home to the Dominican Republic to a ransacked hideout and his girlfriend being beaten within an inch of her life. Irked, but still remarkably in control of his actions, our nameless killer makes his way up the chain of command in order to get answers and a little bit of retribution too. It's not a business where you can exactly forgive and forget and move on together.
Deconstructing the Killer Mythos
A director of David Fincher's age and status don't make movies for the sake of making the best movie they possibly can anymore. They want to explore and challenge particular ideas. In this case, the professional killer as a creative construction. Taking obvious inspirations from Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Fincher and his old screenwriting buddy Andrew Kevin Walker offer us their take on the interiority of a man who ends other people's lives.
The triumph of this movie is that Michael Fassbender's character doesn't succumb to the tenets of what would make for "conventionally good storytelling". Times and times again, characters he encounters appeal to his humanity and times and times again, the killer repeats his mantra to detach himself and accomplish whatever task he needs to accomplish in order to guarantee his own survival. The Killer is a very self-aware film that explores the narrative potential of an iconic archetype.
By that, I mean that the killer himself is generating the situation he faces by making decisions in regards to his own survival. Any form of moral struggle is portrayed through internal dialogue and the killer never explores the inner workings of his own feelings. It might seem like the makings of a boring, straightforward narrative where nothing is at stake, but I can assure you it isn't. The Killer is unconventional by any means, but it's an original for of storytelling that eschews any possible moral platitude there is.
I don’t mean to be your friendly neighborhood Nietzchean idiot, but it feels different and great not to have your protagonist rewarded or punished in regards to his morality.
The Subtle Charms of Literary Cinema
I’m not the biggest hired killer movie enthusiast and in that regard, The Killer is content enough to go through the motions because there’s only so far you can go with that trope. It's another movie about a hired killer that gets double crossed and seeks vengeance. You already know more or less how they go. But The Killer is worth two hours of your time anyway not because of the story it tells, but rather because of how it tells it. It's the closest I've seen cinema getting to a book reading experience in a while.
The off camera first person narration that balances exposition with inner monologue, the separation of the narrative in chapters, the straight out refusal to hit certain beats cinema feels forced to hit too often, it had an intimacy and wit that you usually only find in literature. That said, it's not the type of movie that you can browse your phone to every five minutes. If you don't like quirky details and stuff that doesn't call attention to itself, you might get bored quick. You have to pay attention, but it's rewarding.
*
The Killer is not the pretentious bore some critics claim it is, but it's not really a masterpiece either. I would totally love either David Fincher or another talented director to take this approach to storytelling and tell less telegraphic story with it, though. I feel like it opened a door to a bolder way of making cinema, but I wouldn't call it bold or paradigm breaking per se. The Killer will please storytelling nerds like me, but don’t expect something that will rival David Fincher's classic movies. That era might be over.
