BFI London Film Festival 2023: The Killer

The Killer’s tagline is “Execution is everything”. I can only assume that someone on the marketing team at Netflix thought as much of it as I did.

The idea of David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker teaming up as a filmmaking duo for the first time since Seven is, obviously, a promising one. Factor in that it’s clearly some kind of crime effort from its title alone and the promise only grows. At its worst, it’s reasonable to expect some really well-made genre pulp. Unfortunately, it falls short of that and into the realm of low-substance crime porn.

The first twenty minutes or so are, to be fair, quite intriguing. We’re left alone with The Killer himself, played by Michael Fassbender in his first film since X-Men: Dark Phoenix. In the four years since, Fassbender has been making a modest name for himself in the motorsports world with two 24 Hours of Le Mans races to his name. The endurance required for such a race would have been good training, because if David Fincher’s reputation as the king of the retake is to be believed, this must have been one tedious sequence to act.

The Killer is preparing for a long-range kill, from a vantage point in what appears to be a mostly abandoned office block in Paris. His target will come into his view at some point soon, and when they do he has to be prepared both mentally and physically. So he sits cross-legged for long periods, engages in low-impact exercises such as push-ups, and verbally reiterates the steps he needs to take to be successful in his task. Fassbender meticulously does nothing for a while, essentially, but we get all the information we need on his character through an extended, moody voiceover. It sounds like Dexter because it basically is.

Dexter, but for hire, really. The kill goes wrong and this sets into motion a revenge trail of sorts when his employers, or customers in a way, need to remove any connection between him and them. But the Killer is so devoid of any kind of reasonable human emotion that it’s impossible to care about his case for having been treated wrongly. He’s also nowhere near as attentive as he’s presented to be, so it’s hard to know what to even take from The Killer at all. One such example is when he lays down a sheet of newspaper to protect a carpet from the blood that’s rushing from a victim’s head. Unless the newspaper was laminated beforehand, which it wasn’t, you’d think he’d be aware that it isn’t the ideal material for this job. Except in this world it apparently is, and it does its job without any error or repercussions.

Okay, a bit of creative freedom with how liquid-repellant a sheet of newspaper could possibly be isn’t the biggest sin in cinema history. Truth be told, it isn’t the biggest sin in this film either. But it is emblematic of a bigger problem, and that’s that The Killer tries so hard to be so serious and realistic that it just highlights its own flaws as a result.