David Fincher’s Mank was a passion project for the director, but despite its critical acclaim and awards, it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable film, or even that interesting. His follow-up is both of those things, a neo-noir thrilled called The Killer that follows a hit man on his quest for revenge after a botched hit leads to an attack on his home and his girlfriend. (It’s exclusively on Netflix and in select theaters.)
Michael Fassbender plays the title character, whose real name we never learn; he uses a series of aliases that provide one of the movie’s best gags. The film opens with a long monologue from our antihero about the nature of his life and his work, all of it as he waits for his target to appear in Paris. The hit goes awry, and he’s forced to flee, but when he returns home he finds out that two people ransacked his (very nice) house in the Dominican Republic and violently assaulted his girlfriend. He works backwards from there to find out who the assailants were and who ordered the attack, and you can probably imagine what he does with each person he finds as he moves up the chain.
The Killer is all style and vibe, without trifles like character development or story arcs. You have to be on the wavelength of a genre film like this, just like you might with a mystery, and be comfortable with rooting for a ruthless, violent protagonist because he’s persuaded you that his cause is just. The opening scene is slow and meditative, but it’s probably three-fourths of the insight we’re going to get into the main character, because once he fires that single shot that sets the remainder of the story in motion, the plot never lets up.
One of the plot’s more curious aspects is that Fassbender’s character doesn’t kill everyone. He spares at least two people he encounters who he might have killed, one of whom wasn’t involved in the crime but could potentially identify him. He also doesn’t kill the dog, which is an interesting contrast to some of the people he does kill in what seems like … overkill is a poor word choice, I admit, but there’s one in particular that just didn’t seem necessary. Fassbender provides a voice-over through much of the film that makes us privy to his inner monologue, and thus to his personal ethos, and explains some of these choices, but there’s still some mystery left over to give you something to ponder after the film ends.
Fassbender, who had just one film credit between 2017 and this film, is superb in this role, entirely credible and chilling as someone with little to no moral compass and that ideal level of confidence that allows him to act like he belongs in every setting. The screenplay, by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, gives that character nearly all of the air time, threading the needle between exploring the character and keeping him at arm’s length. Most of the other supporting performances are solid but minor, other than Tilda Swinton, who plays another contract killer, where I can’t decide if the role is ridiculous, or if she’s just playing it that way, or if I’m just reacting like this because she’s Tilda Swinton and I expect this from her.
Only one of the many confrontations the Killer has with his various targets turns into a fight scene – the rest involve a lot of talking, and then a gun happens – and it might be a tremendous one. I have no idea, because that scene is so unbelievably dark that I could barely tell anything that was happening, including whether Fassbender was hitting or getting hit. (Both, obviously, but I mean more specifically.) It’s part of a well-documented trend in movies and TV towards making everything too dark to see, but in this case it may have ruined one of the film’s best scenes. I can’t say for sure.
I’ve commented before that I can tolerate violence in film if it furthers the plot, but not suffering as entertainment, which is generally the idea in “torture porn” and slasher films. There is some extreme violence in The Killer and a couple of the kills are stomach-churning, so while I won’t defend its use of violence, I will say that the camera isn’t playing it for entertainment or laughs. Fassbender’s character kills in service of the plot, and it’s up to us to decide if we’re comfortable with some of them.
This isn’t as serious a work as some Fincher’s other films, but it’s a detour into a genre I particularly like (neo-noir, not murder and mayhem), and the lead performance really anchors the film. There’s enough moral ambiguity that it’s not strictly a revenge thriller, but it offers plenty of revenge and plenty of thrills, along with the slightly inscrutable antihero that neo-noir demands.