NYFF 2023 Film Review: The Killer
DAVID FINCHER RETURNS TO FORM WITH THE DECEPTIVELY LAYERED THE KILLER
David Fincher’s The Killer — a deceptively layered hitman yarn — closes out this year’s New York Film Festival. With a minimalist veneer that belies its toothy takedown of capitalism, hustle culture, and our deteriorating gig economy, Fincher’s latest mines new tensions from the disciplined loner trope. Many will mistake The Killer’s stripped-down trappings for a minor work, but it’s every bit as incisive and wrinkled as Fight Club or The Social Network.
On its surface, David Fincher’s The Killer is a fleet combination of simple pleasures, a no-frills mixture of monastic discipline and competence porn wrapped around the director’s own formal rigor. A movie about a technical fetishist assassin whose world spirals out of control after a botched job, it’s easy to draw a straight line from The Killer to auto-critique after the arguable failure of 2020’s Mank: a gentle ribbing of Fincher’s station as perfectionist taskmaster by way of poking holes in his own processes. And if that’s all it is, a hitman story as metaphor for Hollywood’s most meticulous imagemaker, then it’s also easy to understand its chilly reception out of Venice and New York this year. Luckily, The Killer has much more on its mind.
A detached loner plucked straight from “literally me” fiction such as Le Samouraï and Drive, The Killer’s protagonist (an icy Michael Fasssbender) is very good at what he does. Patient, methodical, and efficient, Fassbender’s anonymous gun-for-hire lines up his kills according to a playlist of The Smiths and seemingly immovable credos, delivered ad nauseam through droning voiceover. But right off the bat, The Killer throws a wrench into the familiarity of movies about contract killers with a diagetic warning: “If you’re not able to endure boredom, this work is not for you.” Do you want to watch David Fincher’s hitman movie? Well, here’s 20 minutes of the titular killer waiting in an office building, and here are prolonged montages of murder rigamarole: sorting Ziplocs, unloading rental cars, and leafing through fake IDs. An unforgiving takedown of our mind-numbing freelance culture through the lens of the most cinematically cool of professions, The Killer has plenty to say about our decaying world, and even moreso when things go pear-shaped for our careful assassin. On routine assignment, Fassbender’s killer finds himself on the back foot when a misfire fells a bystander instead of his intended target. When his elusive employers exact satisfaction of the personal kind, our operator leaps into action to find - and punish - those responsible. Once his organization’s best, most reliable asset, he’s now persona non grata: the modern-day gig economy at its finest.
“An unforgiving takedown of our mind-numbing gig economy through the lens of the most cinematically cool of professions…”
“Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Forbid empathy.” Fincher extracts some of the driest humor of his filmography with just how much his once-collected hitman doesn’t listen to his own mantras, jettisoning his entire worldview into a cascade of chaos when a single thing goes awry. The Killer loves to shatter the illusion of hustle culture nonsense, but that doesn’t mean it’s forgotten its mass-appeal allure. He might bump - nay, crash - into the limits of control (Tilda Swinton, hello), but he’s still brutally effective; his bloodthirsty vendetta, heavily bristling against the voice in his own head, is some of the most satisfying and cinematic depictions of problem-solving at the movies this year. Crisp, snappy action framed by Fassbender’s limber dexterity and Erik Messerschmidt’s gorgeous, freer-than-usual lenswork, The Killer is eager to remind us how good David Fincher is with the tools at his disposal. And just when we’re all getting a little too comfortable with easy, middle-of-the-road dopamine hits, we’re brought back down with a scathing critique of our crumbling society and a sobering realization: Alain Delon-type, sigma grindset assassins just don’t hit the same when squatting out of derelict WeWorks, scarfing Atkins McMuffins, and sleeping out of Hertz rentals.
The Killer’s disguise as a trash genre exercise has elicited plenty of shrugs, but make no mistake, it’s every bit as potent and layered as Fincher’s masterworks of The Social Network and Fight Club. Is it filmmaker auto-fiction? Or is it a dark mirror for a world that has crossed the capitalist Rubicon? Can you still be Jef Costello while quoting Malcolm Gladwell and reciting Airbnb superhost stats? The Killer unearths the tension between taciturn men of action and a money-focused society that has stripped them of their agency and cool, turning a cold-blooded killer into yet another cog in the consumerist machine; Fight Club once sought to fight the system, but now almost 25 years later, The Killer is resigned to the rot. The assassin notes: “Nothing I do will put a dent in those metrics.”
