The Killer (2023) - Movie Review

A new David Fincher film coming out is always cause for celebration. A new David Fincher film coming out after he scored another career highlight with Mank, more so. A new David Fincher film coming out with reuniting with writer Andrew Kevin Walker, the scribe behind his breakthrough work Se7en (and script doctor on his other crowning work Fight Club), even more so than that. Sure, I can’t say I was expecting this to entirely reach those same heights, but as someone who holds both creatives in such high esteem, I was definitely curious to see what a new team-up between them would look like. And in a lot of ways, it’s business as usual for the both of them, and in just as many, there’s something different going on here.

The titular Killer, as played by Michael Fassbender, is a central character cut from the same cloth as Tyler Durden. The cool, calm, collected misanthrope who sees himself as something of a guru for men just as disaffected as himself. He spends most of the opening act narrating about his work as a hitman, philosophising about the modern world, and repeating a set of rules for how he carries himself like a self-affirmation mantra. However, where Durden had a certain dangerous allure to him, the tone is set right from the beginning that the Killer is not cool. He couldn't even be mistaken for being cool. He is quite emphatically one of the most pretentious and bougie contract killers in any work of fiction.

The way the narrative frames his character, and how he views himself, feels like both Fincher and Walker are also examining their own actions, particularly how it’s reflected in their bodies of work. Fincher’s most famous feature, Fight Club, is also one of the more famous examples of a fandom building around the very ideas that a fictional work is against, with Tyler Durden serving as an emblematic figure within the Manosphere (or ‘Redpill’ community, in a case of doubling down on referencing works under the misinformed assumption that they support their argument). I can’t imagine that it’s easy living with the notion that you are, in however small a way, responsible for fuelling the ugly and toxic mindset of an entire generation of misguided men.

And with The Killer, Fincher and Walker set their eyes on that kind of masculine façade. Where the manliest thing a man can do is not care about anything or anyone, yet that attitude is part of an attempt to sound cool to people who aspire to be alpha males or sigma males or whatever else, so clearly they care about something.

Where his pretentiousness gets even better is with how, despite his The House That Jack Built-esque musings, he’s… really not that good at his job. The larger narrative wouldn’t even exist if he didn’t screw up, and as he progresses further along the rather episodic structure of the plot, he continues to chant his set of rules while slowly but steadily breaking each and every one of them.

It rhymes somewhat with what I noticed with the cynicisms in Mank, where they were all built on a foundation that ended up belying how, despite his artistic insistence otherwise, there’s a certain humane idealism hiding underneath Fincher’s detached coldness. Except here, the character arc is all about scratching away at that nihilistic pretence to reveal that… well, the Killer actually has a heart. One that quickens more often than he’d care to admit. Fassbender’s performance as that façade is admittedly a little too good, since he does a better job of maintaining the illusion than the character as written. But as a more self-aware instance of the ‘lone wolf’ archetype, with his playlist full of nothing but The Smiths and his describing of others as “normies” unironically, it helps to re-establish what the filmmakers truly think about people who think and act like this.

Beyond just how unhealthy it is to think that this is a goal worth aiming for, shutting yourself away from any and all emotional stimuli and reaction, it also details just how… not like us it is. One of the Killer’s earlier bits of narration has him asking “Of those who like to put their faith in the inherent goodness of mankind, I have to ask ‘Based on what, exactly?’”. But as he keeps moving across the world, at first trying to correct his initial botched assassination and then finding himself on a warpath that is totally not personal, you guys, he ends up serving as his own answer. Like with a lot of these self-styled meninist gurus, what he advices of others (and even of himself) differs greatly from how he actually acts, only in this instance, the cracks in that discipline reveal someone who is kind. Not a good person, not entirely, but someone capable of being one. A germ of goodness hiding in someone who makes a job out of insisting that he doesn’t have one and that he shouldn’t have one.

In the larger oeuvre of David Fincher’s exploration of humans as perverts, what is being said here isn’t necessarily all that different from what he’s already unearthed in past films. He’s still showing just enough of his own heart to make it clear that his interest in the cynical behaviours of man comes out of a certain understanding that there’s more than just that to be found within. But as something of a reflection on how his own works have informed those very behaviours in the real world, and how his attempt to depict a man being crushed under the weight of capitalism and heteronormativity would get co-opted by people who think those things are A-OK, it’s genuinely fascinating and as well-made as anything Fincher has ever laid his hands on. It may not get as much into the delectable world-building that Andrew Kevin Walker excels at, but that’s made up for by how it gives him an outlet for the morbid and pitch-black sense of humour he and Fincher share.