The Killer

THE KILLER   ***1/2

David Fincher

2023

IDEA:  Following a botched hit, a contract killer attempts to clean up his mess by targeting the higher-ups who are out for him.

BLURB:  At first, Michael Fassbender’s titular Killer might seem like a disciplined and honorable - even cool - ascetic-type master warrior, in the vein of Jef Costello in Le Samouraï or the Lone Man in The Limits of Control. But within minutes of listening to his continuously running internal monologue, one easily grasps that this guy is really a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing douchebag. He has more in common with such past Fincher protagonists as Fight Club’s Narrator or The Social Network’s Mark Zuckerberg, deeply insecure white men who take laborious pains to convince themselves of their worth in an increasingly estranging, atomized techno-capitalist culture. The Killer is particularly and mordantly attuned to how this figure manifests today, when the propagation of militant far-right ideology on social media platforms has deluded a contingent of cisgender white men into thinking they’re the ones actually being attacked, and the answer is to take up arms and “fuck your feelings.” This resonates with the Killer’s mantra to “forbid empathy,” as “empathy is weakness” and “weakness is vulnerability.” As he drones on about his noble precepts and work ethic - things he then consistently undermines in his actions - The Killer reveals itself as a sharp, blackly funny satire of a kind of digital-age self-absorbed derangement, abetted by a dehumanizing global capitalist order that reduces human interaction to the logic of commerce. DP Erik Messerschmidt renders this world in inky cobalt-black cut by queasy chartreuse and orange, panes of glass and the eerie glow of electronic locks. Despite the darkness, there could be absolution yet for the Killer, a fan of the Smiths who might just have to admit to himself that his IDGAF attitude is barely suppressing the fact that he does give a fuck.