Michael Fassbender stars in this cold stare into the void of a hired assassin
The Killer
Starring Michael Fassbender
Directed by David Fincher
Rated R
In limited theatrical release Oct. 27, on Netflix Nov. 10
He travels the world, loves British rock band The Smiths, meticulously tracks his heart rate and limbers up every day with yoga. And he makes his living killing people—with rifles, pistols, nail guns, bombs, poison or whatever other means necessary. Michael Fassbender plays the unnamed professional assassin-for-hire in this stylishly chilling neo-noir drama from director David Fincher, who has plumbed the dark, cold depths of bleak nihilism before in movies like Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. It’s another stone-cold stare into the void as we watch “the killer” go about his work with icy, expressionless, amoral precision, purging himself of empathy and laser-focused on his job—until an assignment in Paris hits a snag, his bullet misses its target, and the hunter suddenly becomes the hunted. It’s a gripping riff on a fatalistic job and a guy who does it, with an aloof “procedural” tone that takes an abrupt shift into revenge-survival mode as Fassbender’s character tries to find out—and rub out—the parties assigned to clean up the loose ends of his botched hit. The grim goings-on are deadly serious, but there are a few glimpses of dark humor as the killer uses aliases (we never know his real name) from classic TV shows, employs a cheese grater in a brutally bruising fight scene, and has a fateful encounter with a rival (Tilda Swinton) who tells a fearlessly funny existential joke about a bear in the woods. We never get to know much about the killer, and that’s the way he wants it, going about his work in the shadows, an anonymous figure leaving a path of destruction on a career track where people want other people dead. A finely tooled exercise in dirty work, this is a lean, mean descent into a deadly “professional” underworld with dozens of ways to die—especially if you cross paths with The Killer.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 