The quiet, ruminative introduction of David Fincher’s latest presents a haggard Michael Fassbender – the eponymous killer. An assassin staking out his target, he is disillusioned and tired, and his voiceover reiterates lines familiar to this genre, bromides regarding one’s luck if they never meet this cold-blooded killer, regarding the absence of true justice in this world, regarding luck being a false construct. Fassbender looks like a genre convention through most of this sequence, too, with an outfit that looks like it was pulled from Le Samourai. The opening scene could be considered a riff on Rear Window. These allusions, whether intentional or not, come off as unimportant as they would to the “Killer” himself – they are empty gestures to spectacular fictions regarding how crime operates.

As the V.O. monologue goes on, it bleeds into something more intriguing, something decidedly more mundane – “redundancies, redundancies, redundancies.” In Fincher’s film, killing is a craft, perhaps, but it’s also a day job. It becomes as normative and banal as bagging groceries or desk jockeying. This man’s life is so familiar that he is aware of the cliches as he speaks them, relies on them for some hollow standard to operate under. Our introduction to the film’s nameless assassin is a signal that we are in a genre deconstruction, one in which the movie depiction of the assassin is itself under scrutiny.

It is a somewhat odd balance the film strikes. Fassbender’s killer is himself a cliché – he is exacting, icy, works alone, and has his quirks (he likes listening to The Smiths when he pulls the trigger, for one). Yet he acknowledges the clichéd cultural understanding of the deadly assassin. The depiction here is a contradiction – Fincher, to an extent, wants to have his cake and eat it too with this process-oriented crime thriller. Thank god it’s a delicious cake.

“Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness.” These are central thoughts the killer has, moments before he botches an assassination. It is the first time he has ever erred (it is also, in relation to the repetitive mantras, a very funny punchline). Why empathy crosses his mind in the first place is not immediately clear. But its connection to the inciting incident of the film pulls the contradiction to the surface. Put simply, the disconnection from the world required of the man’s profession is far less practical when the possibility of being on the other side of the gun enters into the equation. And, as becomes clear later, his no empathy mantra (and, quite likely, his whole refrain of hollow cliches) is more of a coping mechanism than anything else, a means of putting on the persona of a cinematic antihero.

As is usually the case, Fincher crafts an exceedingly watchable film in The Killer. The first act of the film presents this botched hit job and its immediate fallout. It unravels slowly, and the voiceover is endlessly laden with superficial statements that say very little. And yet, the sequence unfolds with a casually brilliant aesthetic. Mostly static shots elongate the feeling of time. Even after all has gone wrong, the camera is as steady as the killer’s outward appearance, but the fear of potential discovery rises to the surface all the same. We know a fateful reversal has occurred – it occurred the moment he fired a bullet into the wrong person’s abdomen. Every movement the man makes from here on out has consequences, and Fincher dwells on each one.

By the end of the film, we realize there isn’t much to The Killer when thinking simply on a plot level. This is a revenge mission like many seen in movies before. But at the moments where things come into focus and the Killer sees things slightly more clearly than his inner monologue allows for, it becomes clear that what we are watching is a desperate attempt by one man to justify his actions. These are the things we tell ourselves every day so that we don’t have to think about the “why” and only have to think about the “what.” Stick to the plan. Don’t improvise. It’s only easier.

The Killer: B

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)