What happens when an assassin with a perfect record finally misses? The ensuing chaos drives director David Fincher’s riveting “The Killer,” anchored by Michael Fassbender, whose constant narration cleverly transforms the job of carrying out contract killings from one of glamor and intrigue to deadly drudgery.
Working from a French graphic novel, Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker (reuniting after their early masterpiece “Se7en”) establish the boredom associated with waiting around for the ideal moment to murder somebody – especially on “Annie Oakley jobs” – eating fast food and killing time even in an international metropolis. Think “The Accidental Tourist,” just armed with a silencer.
Before the scene reaches that inevitable conclusion, the killer spends some time quietly, patiently watching the expert enjoy her last supper. It’s a change of pace for him; as she herself points out (using a darkly funny grizzly bear metaphor), confronting her in a public place like this is a big risk for a man typically focused on not attracting attention. While Fassbender keeps the character’s facial expressions carefully controlled—there’s no empathetic nodding here, not a flicker of pity or regret about what he’s here to do—we grow to learn something about him by watching another assassin ramble.
Even when creating more specific, tailor-made items for Fassbinder, Adams and David Fincher went back to basics. One of the standard pieces of the killer’s uniform is a bucket hat; initially, it was custom-made to fit Fincher’s desire to have the killer wear something nylon or water-resistant so that the character wouldn’t need an umbrella. Ultimately, however, Adams landed on a hat her team found in an Army surplus store in Venice, California. “We made some hats, and it just didn’t work,” Adams said. “Then one of my shoppers found this roll-up hat, and we purchased a bunch of them.”
The macro part of this, and the supposed draw of the film, is the kills themselves. We observe as the killer identifies his target, moves to a new locale, adapts his methods, and engages in a grimly funny confrontation with a person he must wipe out of existence, before he does the wiping. But the micro part — the part that is more intimate and relatable, that tickles the viewer right in the subconscious — is the accumulation of little details around each kill. Part of this is the preparation, but another, just as important part is the planned withdrawal afterward, whether the kill succeeded or not. There’s cleaning up to do, sometimes literally; there are the tools of the job to get rid of, including the person the killer was pretending to be. Then he disappears into the night, shorn of even the name he arrived with.
For ordinary people leading ordinarily messy, cluttered lives, it’s a deep fantasy to watch someone routinely pack up, shed everything, and walk away — over and over and over again. Imagine just letting it all go, scrubbing it all out, chucking it all away. Imagine the cleanliness and simplicity of just erasing anything you don’t want to deal with. Is it just me? David Fincher knows that it isn’t.
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