[COLUMN] The Killer is a Work-for-Hire Assassination Thriller | Darren Mooney (Patreon)

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In some ways, The Killer feels like a logical extension of previous collaborations between director David Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker. Walker wrote the script for se7en, and did uncredited polishes on The Game and Fight Club. Like many of Fincher’s movies, these are films about emotional numbness in the modern age. They are studies of detachment and disconnect, focusing on characters who frequently lack any tether to the world around them.

The Killer is built around this idea. It is a globe-trotting thriller focusing on an anonymous assassin (Michael Fassbender) who finds his life upended when a job in Paris goes awry. Much of the movie is spent inside this hitman’s head. He narrates for the audience, sharing his worldview. It’s cold and clinical. He rationalizes his violence by concealing beneath a sea of statistics. There’s a grim punch-clock nihilism to all this, as he reassures the audience (and himself) that nothing he does matters.

He works for the highest bidder. He doesn’t ask questions. He never involves himself in the business of his employers or his victims. “If I am effective, it’s because one simple thing: I don’t give a fuck,” he explains. The job pays well enough that the assassin can afford his own private life in Venezuela, with his partner Magdala (Sophie Charlotte). The Killer doesn’t offer any context for this domestic situation, because the protagonist must detach himself from it in order to do his work. This tropical mansion is separate from professional life.

From a distance, The Killer is a cold and dispassionate film that paints a portrait of an increasingly impersonal world. Fincher and Walker are ostensibly adapting the French comic book of the same name, written by Alexis “Matz” Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. However, that comic book launched in 1998, a quarter-of-a-century ago. The Killer is a movie that is firmly situated in the current moment, even beyond the plastic COVID shield in Leo’s (Gabriel Polanco) taxi cab.

The assassin drifts through a world in which human contact has become increasingly rare. He is introduced staking out his target from an abandoned WeWork office, wary of the nanny cams that “superhosts” install in their AirBnB rentals. He subsists on a diet of McDonalds food, offering the maximum protein for the lowest price. He operates from storage lockers around the country, wondering to himself what his eventual episode of Storage Wars might look like.

This hitman orders his tools of the trade from Amazon and gets them shipped overnight to a collection depot that he opens with a handy PIN code. He signs up to his target’s gym using an information kiosk at the reception desk, avoiding the staff. He drives an unmarked and indistinct white van, and – when it’s time to discard that – he abandons it in a sea of other unmarked and indistinct white vans. He gains entry to various locations by posing as a service worker.

When he does interact with other human beings, those also tend to be service workers. They are often people manning the reception desks at hotels, airports and car rental places. If not, they are janitors or wait staff. During the movie’s first assassination sequence, the tensest moment involves the building’s superintendent (glimpsed only through frosted glass) dropping off the mail. These are people who keep this impersonal world ticking along.

To be fair, the assassin seems to harbor few delusions. He begins the movie insisting that he is one of “the few” as opposed to “the many”, but his actions belie that assertion. He provides a service, just as sure as the Postmates employee delivering groceries. Tellingly, he treats his body as an instrument. He cares for it like he cares for his gun. He talks about the torture of “sleep deprivation.” He does his morning stretches. He wears a watch that monitors his pulse.

In his narration, the hitman notes that he can only make the perfect shot if his body and the rifle are in perfect harmony. In order to be sure that the bullet will follow its assigned trajectory, he needs to control his breathing and his pulse as he pulls the trigger. He is less an individual than he is a mechanism. It’s all very impersonal. He listens to music to drown out the voices in his head as he works. He repeats his mantra, “Forbid empathy.” There is no room for human emotion in all this.

Indeed, watching The Killer, it can often feel like Fincher is playing with his own popular image. Fincher is one of the defining modern auteurs, and he has a very distinctive style. His movies are often clinical and precise, leading to the impression that his work is “cold and without passion or humanity.” Fincher is famous for demanding a high number of takes from his cast and crew, with actors like Jesse Eisenberg and Carrie Coon describing him as “a perfectionist.”

There is certainly a sense that The Killer is playing with this perception of Fincher. This is a movie about a hired murderer that spends its opening twenty minutes with the character as he lines up the perfect shot. It’s hard not to think of Fincher as the assassin deals with his employers on the phone, concerned about schedule and budget overruns on the job, as the hitman waits for everything to be right. Then, at the last minute, just when he has his shot lined up, it ends up botched.

Of course, Fincher has consistently disputed this popular characterization of him as an exacting perfectionist, dismissing it as “a lot of bullshit.” He has explained, “We’re not trying to do something perfect. You know, perfect is the commercial.” Indeed, it’s worth noting that The Killer follows a deeply personal project for Fincher. His previous film, Mank, was a movie written by his deceased father. It’s difficult to imagine any clinical detachment from a work like that.

Indeed, The Killer suggests that the eponymous character’s pursuit of cold and clinical detachment is self-delusional folly. During that initial job, the bullet goes astray, and it kills an innocent bystander. The assassin shrugs it off as the price of doing business. However, this failure provokes his employers. They plan to ambush him in Venezuela, but – sensing that he is being followed – the hitman delays his flight. Instead, they arrive at his villa and find Magdala. So, they brutalize her instead.

The irony of this situation seems to be lost on the character. His murder of an innocent bystander was collateral damage, but the assault on Magdala demands retribution. As much as the hitman tells the audience that he is being cold and rational, as much as his voiceover assures the audience that he is simply making a calculated business decision, it is very clear that his response to this violence is emotional in nature. “How’s ‘I don’t give a fuck’ working out for you?” he asks himself.

The Killer repeatedly suggests that as much as the people working in this industry might think that it is impersonal, it is still human. It is imperfect, leaving room for human error. No matter how much the people in this field might claim to be detached and rational, they are ultimately human in all their flaws. This denial does them no service in the end. In her final moments, the contractor (Tilda Swinton) who oversaw the assault of Magdala muses that she wishes she had eaten more ice cream.

Like a lot of Fincher’s films, The Killer has moments of pitch-black comedy. Characters are often interrupted mid-sentence, with the assassin occasionally cut off mid-internal-monologue. An attempt to torture his handler (Charles Parnell) for information goes horribly wrong when that handler bleeds out much quicker than calculations suggested that he would. The assassin might strive for a cold and clinical perfection, but The Killer understands that the necessary detachment is impossible.

This is also reflected in the filmmaking. Fincher’s style tends towards careful compositions and precise camera movements. He is very fond of dollies and cranes. However, Fincher shoots a lot of The Killer with handheld cameras. More than that, the frame is constantly shuddering and shaking, often as airplanes or trains pass by, illustrating how fragile the assassin’s perfectly constructed world truly is. At the hospital, visiting Magdala, the lights pulse on and off to capture his panicked state.

The Killer suggests that it is impossible for even a hired murderer to be as dispassionate as this assassin claims to be. Even operating at the distance of a sniper rifle, this character is still too close to humanity. His attempts to deny this just leads to sloppiness, allowing for a certain carelessness to creep in around the edges. There is, perhaps, something strangely comforting in this, in the idea that hired killers are still not quite as dispassionate as automated terminals selling gym membership.

Of course, The Killer acknowledges that it is possible for some people to become truly detached from violence, but only those who insulate themselves from the performance of it. The assassin eventually tracks down the client who ordered the initial hit and who subsequently ordered the attack on the assassin’s home. Claybourne (Arliss Howard) is a wealthy financier who lives in a beautiful penthouse overlooking Chicago.

Claybourne is surprised to find the assassin standing in his apartment, brandishing a pistol. He is not surprised because he is being confronted with the consequences of his decisions, but instead because he doesn’t recognize the man holding the gun. The hitman has to jog his memory. Claybourne finally figures out what this is about when he reads the address of the initial job. He seems completely unaware of how messy everything got.

Claybourne talks about what happened through euphemism. He purchased “insurance” to cover his “liability” in case there was “blowback” from the botched job. He hasn’t given any serious thought to the consequences of his actions. This is just an interruption to a finance call, as the television in the background reports on the stock market. This is what true detachment looks like, and it’s horrifying. It’s not a guy on the other end of a gun, it’s a guy on the other end of the phone.

This seems to unsettle even the cold-blooded assassin. “I’m curious,” he observes. “I break into your home in the middle of the night holding a gun, and you have no idea why I might be here?” This is the hitman’s big epiphany, and it is core to The Killer. This is a story about assassination as work for hire in this gig economy. In the end, the assassin is just as anonymous and disposable as the receptionists and waiters that he encountered throughout the movie.

The Killer is not especially subtle in its commentary on the inhumanity of modern existence, where human interaction is minimized and marginalized in the name of efficiency and profit margins. However, there’s something perversely humanist in its assertion that, no matter how cold and dispassionate these systems might be, human imperfection is a universal constant.