The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

[therewillbeblus]

The title also makes sense, since it hints at Fincher’s primary thematic infatuation with (the human need/craving for/comfort in) identity

[beamish14]

They did make 35mm prints for The Power of the Dog, All Quiet on the Western Front, Bardo and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, so there is a chance that we get 35mm prints for this.

It's not stated on the poster but this will open in theaters on October 27.

The Other Side of the Wind, Shirkers, Gunpowder Milkshake, both of their Noah Baumbach films, and I’m sure a few others did, too. Roma, of course, got the 70mm treatment

THREE Baumbach films got prints, funny enough. Also, American Made and Okja. I’ve been told that Netflix is terrible at archiving their prints and managing traffic for them as the company has high turnover and they have no folk with theatrical distribution skills. I heard most of those prints that played at the New Beverly just ended up in Tarantino’s archive.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. I keep wondering if they’ll program some big blowout retrospective of their theatrically-released films when the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian theatre finally reopens.

[Kracker]

...

"Don't release the really nice poster, we don't want people to get too excited" (Spotted in Venice)

Much more obvious Le Samouraï nod on this one

[P-Rock]

Let's hope it's more exciting than Mank. What a slog was that to sit through.

[feihong]

Didn't realize this was adapted from the Matz and Jacamon graphic novel. Nothing in the visuals really tipped that off. Watching the trailer, I wondered if it was another vague adaptation of Manchette's The Prone Gunman, Hollywoodized once again.

I guess I'm a Fincher anti-fan––I have never liked one of his movies––and I've seen almost all of them. I suppose Zodiac came closest for me, but still...a bust. I really like Michael Fassbender in lots of stuff. I suppose I'll end up seeing this. But I'd be lying if I said I liked the look of it so far, or the feel of the trailer.

[jazzo]

I've read the Matz comic, and quite honestly I'm kinda hoping this is one of those cases where the source material acts more as inspiration than anything else, and that the story begins to take off in more interesting directions the the rote genre story it comes from. The only thing that distinguished it at the time of its North American release/translation was the sparsity of crime/noir books in the medium it was produced for.

I remember thinking (as I read it), if this were a movie, Antoine Fuqua would have directed it, and my dad would have loved every second.

[Mr Sausage]

Fincher excels at conventional genre films, so I’m not worried that the story is rote or contrived any more than I was with Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Panic Room or Gone Girl. As with those and others, it’s the sheer style that’ll carry them to interesting places. (Not unlike with Woo and Melville’s takes on this material).

It’s when Fincher tackles stories centring on relationships or sentiment ala Benjamin Button that I get nervous. It’s one reason I haven’t got round to Mank, along with being uninterested in the subject.

[therewillbeblus]

Mank is a difficult film, but it's not really centered on relationships or sentiment in an obtrusive way. It's more like The Social Network, where thematically it is working in the service of grazing vulnerability, but the style acts as a shield reflexively mirroring the characters' defense mechanisms to protect against actually going or staying there. And because Fincher is as or more interested in the mechanics or process, as he is in the results or undercurrent, it's not a means to an end but allowed to be a pleasurable experience isolated from that ultimate reveal (i.e. the scene in Mank where a bunch of screwball writers sit in a roundtable and briefly transform the film into a screwball comedy before it diverts back to a dramatic biopic).

I can appreciate that many people were just bored by that film and it doesn't automatically deserve rope if producing that effect, but I also don't think I've come across a criticism that demonstrates an understanding of what the film is trying to do, and the main barrier seems to be sourced in misinterpreting Fincher's thematic interests and auteurist practices.

[feihong]

I've read the Matz comic, and quite honestly I'm kinda hoping this is one of those cases where the source material acts more as inspiration than anything else, and that the story begins to take off in more interesting directions the the rote genre story it comes from. The only thing that distinguished it at the time of its North American release/translation was the sparsity of crime/noir books in the medium it was produced for.

I remember thinking (as I read it), if this were a movie, Antoine Fuqua would have directed it, and my dad would have loved every second.

I had a sense about the comic, suspecting it was pretty much like what you're saying it was––which is probably why I never read the book.

[Never Cursed]

Another technically proficient, emotionally distant, ultimately unsatisfying passion project from Fincher, a movie so performatively quick and straightforward ("lean to a fault," as a friend quite accurately put it) that its capacity to surprise or move is basically nil. All of which seems to have been Fincher's goal from the opening lines of the film! Michael Fassbender's assassin's inner life is characterized by total modernized ennui. He keeps track of his health via FitBit, listens to music on an iPod, buys electronic doohickeys off Amazon, pokes around gyms, hotels, apartment complexes, restaurants that look exactly like the soulless airports in which he spends many of his non-murderous hours, stacks his cash with an early-millennial-friendly bank in Grand Central Terminal (or at least what he doesn't spend on storage units filled with a thousand guns and license plates), and seems altogether like a more philosophically disturbed version of Fincher's more famous unnamed protagonist. Francis Fukuyama would look upon the two of them, and the lack of movement that Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker have made in the twenty years, with admiration. Botching a hit snaps Fassbender out of his complacent awe at the homogeny of the world and the sameness of his interaction with it, but only enough to replace some of the samurai code mantras he repeats with sunnier platitudes. That our time is precious and we gotta stop and smell the roses seemed pretty straightforward to such a screen intellect as Ferris Bueller, so it's a little exasperating to see Fassbender's internal arc sort of stop there, but I can't say that it's inappropriate for the film he inhabits. What better a moral for a moderately engaging movie about a kinda boring guy who makes an almost inherently dramatic occupation seem routine?

All that said, the actual action sequences themselves are definitely well-staged (though they're so coldly showy and Formal that in places they basically resemble a live-action Hitman: World of Assassination advert) and Tilda Swinton has a week's-worth-of-work walk-on role that blows away every other actor in the film, complete with great dialogue that has to have been written specifically for her natural cadence and delivery.

[Mr Sausage]

Another technically proficient, emotionally distant, ultimately unsatisfying passion project from Fincher

Is this a reference to Mank, or did you have another film in mind?

Your review actually makes me more interested in the movie, even if the thing ends up being as slight and uninvolving as you make out. I'm kind of keen to see Fincher try his hand at pared down, lean filmmaking given his usual preference for elaborate, even baroque stylishness. It's like he's doing Soderbergh.

Also, the idea of turning an object of filmic cool like assasins into a banal, everyday job like office work, even if the idea seems undramatic and deflating, is also kind of fascinating. A vision of modern banality. Even crime is numbing.

Can't wait.

[therewillbeblus]

Also, the idea of turning an object of filmic cool like assasins into a banal, everyday job like office work, even if the idea seems undramatic and deflating, is also kind of fascinating. A vision of modern banality. Even crime is numbing.

Can't wait.

I’ve been anticipating enjoying this for the same reason - a modernist Melville by way of Le Carré. I also expect this to be a bit like the inverse of Mindhunter's relatively stripped-down, clinical presentation, here focused on the actual killer going about their work, with probably a lot less talking, psychoanalyzing, etc.

And I'm only realizing now that, after critically re-evaluating the few Finchers I disliked over the past several years, I only really hate Benjamin Button. Everything else is at least good or interesting.

[Never Cursed]

Another technically proficient, emotionally distant, ultimately unsatisfying passion project from Fincher

Is this a reference to Mank, or did you have another film in mind?

Yeah, I meant Mank, though obviously "passion project" means a different thing for this film.

And maybe I should have emphasized this earlier, but I'd admire the construction and intent of the film a lot more if Fincher hit any surprise beats with Fassbender's journey. I wouldn't call this film "uninteresting" exactly, but it's predictable to a fault in its extremely straightforward, almost stock string of complications:

Spoiler

The injured lover -> the oath of revenge -> the violent visit to the mentor -> the big fight -> the big confrontation -> the man behind the man behind everything, etc. If you just laid out the beats on cards, you'd see the guts of action thrillers leading all the way back to the Connery Bonds and probably further. And that would be an unfair comparison only if there was more of an emotional hook or connecting spark to make one view these events differently.

Like, even if you don't open that spoiler-box, I can assure you that you really have seen all of these events before, probably in the same order. I'm very sympathetic to "Oh, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take..." (just look at how much I like Paul Schrader's recent movies to see evidence of that particular failing of mine), but that does mandate that the path in fact be strange.

I’ve been anticipating enjoying this for the same reason - a modernist Melville by way of Le Carré. I also expect this to be a bit like the inverse of Mindhunter's relatively stripped-down, clinical presentation, here focused on the actual killer going about their work, with probably a lot less talking, psychoanalyzing, etc.

You're half-and-half here. Is it about the process and not the person? Yes. Is it stripped-down and clinical? Also yes. Is there a shitload of chatter from the killer? Yes. I don't think there's a stray thought of Fassbender's that doesn't end up on screen as voiceover, right down to his thoughts on McDonald's food. (Though most of that isn't bad and serves the function of highlighting the amazingly shiny globalized world in which he lives).

[therewillbeblus]

Externalizing thoughts would actually be in step with Le Carré's writings on spies lounging around going down cognitive rabbit holes, if it channels that isolation strung-out in banal routines. I guess I meant it'd be the antithesis of a show about two men in conflict and collaboration working towards a common goal of discovering and moving forward, if whittled down to one man mostly talking to himself, and perhaps remaining complacent in reaction to the world.

[Mr Sausage]

And I'm only realizing now that, after critically re-evaluating the few Finchers I disliked over the past several years, I only really hate Benjamin Button. Everything else is at least good or interesting.

I'm the same (with the caveat that I haven't seen Mank). I only hate Benjamin Button, that treacly, annoying Forrest Gump bit of southern-fried picaresque. Although the theatrical cut of Alien 3 I thought was pretty uninteresting (the workprint cut is flawed but much less dull).

[therewillbeblus]

I think I only bothered to see the DC of Alien 3 so I can't even count that, though I don't love it or anything - it's just better than I expected it to be after putting it off for so long. I know I'm alone here, but I think Mank ranks just behind Gone Girl, Zodiac, and The Social Network as his best. I've come back around to Fight Club and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on semi-recent re-evaluations discussed in their individual threads.

Panic Room never did much for me (I'm always puzzled whenever anybody cites it as his best film, and have yet to hear a convincing defense of why) but it's a fine slice of lean entertainment with transparently surface-level ambitions, as is The Game. Se7en is deeper and more ambitious in its structural-thematic hybrid (which Fincher executes so well), and while I don't love it the way I did when I was a kid, it's still an impressive work. I need to revisit it though, it's been too long.

[beamish14]

And I'm only realizing now that, after critically re-evaluating the few Finchers I disliked over the past several years, I only really hate Benjamin Button. Everything else is at least good or interesting.

I'm the same (with the caveat that I haven't seen Mank). I only hate Benjamin Button, that treacly, annoying Forrest Gump bit of southern-fried picaresque. Although the theatrical cut of Alien 3 I thought was pretty uninteresting (the workprint cut is flawed but much less dull).

I’ve always been very partial to the theatrical cut of Alien 3. The looming threat of sexual violence that permeates throughout the film, which makes the prisoners more horrifying than the creature, is a really intriguing facet of it. Ripley’s transformation to a woman wholly out of time, suffering from severe trauma and even further dehumanized by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (which finally has a face in this installment, as they send one of their drones to her), makes her a Billy Pilgrim-like tragic figure. Plus, we get the very interesting alien POV shots and Elliot Goldenthal’s gorgeous score

[Mr Sausage]

And I'm only realizing now that, after critically re-evaluating the few Finchers I disliked over the past several years, I only really hate Benjamin Button. Everything else is at least good or interesting.

I'm the same (with the caveat that I haven't seen Mank). I only hate Benjamin Button, that treacly, annoying Forrest Gump bit of southern-fried picaresque. Although the theatrical cut of Alien 3 I thought was pretty uninteresting (the workprint cut is flawed but much less dull).

I’ve always been very partial to the theatrical cut of Alien 3. The looming threat of sexual violence that permeates throughout the film, which makes the prisoners more horrifying than the creature, is a really intriguing facet of it. Ripley’s transformation to a woman wholly out of time, suffering from severe trauma and even further dehumanized by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (which finally has a face in this installment, as they send one of their drones to her), makes her a Billy Pilgrim-like tragic figure. Plus, we get the very interesting alien POV shots and Elliot Goldenthal’s gorgeous score

I like all those things, too, it's just the Workprint cut gives them a much fuller and more satisfying expression. It's still flawed and not entirely successful--it's a grim, glowering movie full of shouty, unpleasant people--but there's some meat to it.

[Mr Sausage]

Never Cursed's description of the movie is basically correct, except he missed one thing that stood out for me and which made this more than a lean, hollow exercise in emotional distance: that the movie is a low-key, mordant black comedy. I'm not surprised it went unremarked on, as the movie is so deadpan you might miss that it's being funny. Fassbender's Killer is like a boring lifestyle bro, droning on and on about his process, how it grants him control over his world and superiority over the masses. And yet the actual plot is nothing but dumb luck, good and bad, sometimes compounded by bad decisions, all of which undercuts everything he drones on about but nevertheless manages to go mostly unnoticed by him, he's so dead focused on these rules that may or may not have ever helped him.

Spoiler

Look at the series of jokes: Not five minutes after an over-confident, pretentious statement about how luck doesn't exist, Fassbender has the most comical bad luck when he shoots this dude's dominatrix instead. The world's most diligent and patient assassin, and all he gets out of his inhuman patience and days upon days of waking up every hour to check if his target is home, is to cockblock the guy mid-kink by blowing away his dom. Most movies start with a good hit to show off the hero's prowess before moving to the one that goes wrong. Not here: it's all "I'm the best!" speeches followed by a ridiculous cock up.

Next, he goes home, finds his girlfriend has been brutally assaulted, and this shakes him to the core. But the only thing his girlfriend or her brother can think to say to him is how hard they've been working to keep his secrets. Nothing else. No grief, no sharing, no connection, no personal statements or even questions. The girlfriend's first words to him on waking from sedation is just to say, in proud and bragging terms, how happily she endured her brutalization just to show how well she can keep a secret. It's like they're masochists or martyrs to this guy's cover story, the dazed members of his personal cult, and this kinda seems to wig even Fassbender out.

There are a number of jokes about his whole 'anticipation over improvisation' stuff and the supposed calculation behind all his choices. Like when he tells us how perfectly he's calculated how long it'd take someone of the lawyer's age and size to choke to death on their own blood, but the guy succumbs well before Fassbender can even finish telling us about his clever calculations, let alone get the information he wanted. And then in a stroke of good luck, the secretary hands him everything on a plate, and then only because he doesn't follow one of his rules (And we get a funny scene where she laughs at the grotesque joke in the elevator, one of two jokes in the movie Fassbender doesn't get). Or when he tries to drug the dog and his controlled narration suddenly cuts off when he realizes "oh...this dog's way bigger up close", which of course just gets him chased out of the house later. Or when he's sneaking into the guy's house, fully prepared, undetected, again giving us his calm mantras that make him seem like he's in control...and he's bumrushed out of nowhere by a guy he didn't even know was there, once again cut off mid-narration. The resulting fight is terrific, but also funny in small ways. You'd expect a Jason Bourne style beat down given the way Fassbender talks himself up, but he gets roughed up pretty badly, thrown through tables and closets and smashed into walls, only surviving by there being endless objects to hand for him to bean the guy with. It has the virtue of being a very realistic fight while also being funny for how poorly it matches how Fassbender sells himself. In one of the few outright jokes, Fassbender, hiding from the target who now has a gun, rummages through a drawer for what you assume is a weapon, but all he can find is a cheese grater, which seems like a middle finger to him on behalf of the movie, even if it does make for a handy distraction.

Then there's Swinton's hilarious scene, in which first she insults him with a long joke figuring him as a man who just can't admit how much he enjoys being sodomized, and spends her last few moments drunkenly berating him and shaming him, both for the absurd cruelty of how he's dragging out her last moments and his plain discourtesy. It's a fun performance, but also serves as a criticism of Fassbender's killer: here's a successful member of his profession who has a life, who has interests, who has taste, and what's more, who has an actual personality. She actually lives. And he almost sees that, he almost gets the point of her joke. But then he finds a way to reaffirm his own suspect rules and carries on. It's funny, right? He's this loquacious guy who can't stop talking to us about himself, but whenever he's across from an actual human being he can't think of a single thing to say and misses all the jokes. Swinton calls him the villain of her story and, yeah, that's him, he's the villain of any other action movie, the stone-faced uber-assassin who's creepy and has few lines and who's nowhere near as interesting as the lead. Except for some reason he's the lead of this movie.

Another fun joke: the big bad, the man who ordered the double-cross, the villain of the whole piece...is an oblivious middle aged hedge-fund manager who has no idea he set any of this in motion, a complete newbie at the game who poses no danger to anyone except inadvertently. Fassbender seems bewildered by this.

The ending was amusing. Fassbender, now retired, declares himself no longer exceptional, just one of the masses. You know, as he enjoys his millions poolside at his Dominican mansion. But the best part, and it was subtle, was when he walked up to hand his girlfriend her drink, and she flinches. It's small, but you see the buried trauma, and the way Fassbender will be the object of it in this seeming paradise he's built. He's not even remotely capable of dealing with those kind of emotional wounds. A subtle final undercut.

Anyway, another joke I appreciated was Fassbender's preference for The Smiths, whose lyrics he has apparently never properly listened to. When Fassbender listens to How Soon Is Now, an on-the-nose choice for the scene, Fincher pulls us out of Fassbender's point of view and drops the music from the soundtrack juuuuust as the lyrics are about to comment on the situation. Every time. It's like you're Fassbender, always at the moment of getting the point and then just...not.

This is solidly mid-level Fincher. It's a lean, controlled, emotionally sterile genre exercise that distinguishes itself with this black, dead-pan, satirical tone that it mixes in just subtly enough that you might not notice. This is an unromantic assassin film. The only aggrandizement you get is from the Killer himself, and it's just bland self-help mantras and pseudo-philosophical aphorisms that the movie is endlessly subverting while also refusing any context that might validate it.

[therewillbeblus]

Mr Sausage’s defense is compelling, and I largely agree with it, but I found myself feeling closer to Never Cursed’s listlessness throughout my viewing. The comedy isn’t lost on me and the bits outlined in the spoilerbox above were almost all amusing on some level in real time (starting with the looong windup to a thematic punchline that caps the first act and reveals what this film ‘is’). And yet, there’s so much sincere focus on ‘process’ -per usual with Fincher- that all the silent filler, which comprises at least half of this movie, doesn’t gel with the satirical components. Fincher can successfully balance the two, a la Gone Girl (even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to a degree), but those films are primarily engaged with an involving process and the satire is secondary. Gone Girl can succeed between the acidic commentary through its commitment to an immensely pleasurable economy and style streamlining trashy noir. This time around, anything that could be superficially interesting is subverted and so we’re left waiting around for when the deadpan payoffs will once-again be staged. I know the film is going for something way more toned-down than Barry, but that show did most of what works here better - including the most exciting hand-to-hand combat action scene - and leaned into some similar thematic observations with fuller measured as well. The elongated banal sections also worked better in The Limits of Control, which had clever reflexive utility for all that spacious downtime, finding a way to make comedy out of intentional monotony by satirizing both the the glamorized slow-meditative and fast-action polarities of this assassin life with self-consciousness. That’s absent during The Killer’s scenes that only exist for process sans voiceover or interpersonal exchange, so the film feels bifurcated in a non-complimentary manner. It’s funny and mildly provocative as a restrained satire, and then it switches to take itself seriously on the level of form, but one that’s neither narratively intriguing nor stylistically impressive for Fincher. I have no idea what his aims were through this arrhythmic balance (under a steady external mirage of rhythm in clinical technique), but I can’t conceive of a reading where Never Cursed’s assertion that Fincher intends those parts to be investing can be challenged in service of the satirical ambitions.

I dunno, I was primed to like this but in the end it feels like a frustrating failure. No matter how amusing it may be for Swinton to size Fassbender up, her scene seems to exist partially to genuinely demonstrate him ‘letting go’ a bit, first with excessive stalling and then risking the drink. Nothing we’ve been given from him earns that kind of ‘development’ - which is itself so slight and vapid that it’s a joke, but not one that the film seems aware of. Though, I gave Mank a lot of rope as a sly thematic exercise, that I believe is inserting a lot of profound connotation in a curiously-difficult approach, deliberately alienating its audience throughout that work in adopting Mank’s own delusions as psychosocial self-preservation. So it’s very possible I’m actually faulting him for my inability to see what he’s doing here - which seems to be a companion piece to that kind of formalism-mirroring-subtext strategy for inception. But like the case with that film, its detractors are allowed to be unmotivated to do more work than the filmmaker to get in on the plan- so maybe I just don’t ‘get’ what this film is doing all-in-all in the same way I feel that nobody truly seems to understand the depths of Fincher’s last pic

[Mr Sausage]

Nothing we’ve been given from him earns that kind of ‘development’ - which is itself so slight and vapid that it’s a joke, but not one that the film seems aware of.

I don't think that's true. Most of the movie has been a series of rule breaks to indulge this or that emotion, usually unacknowledged, all of which culminates with his need to know more about this woman with a life he thought wasn't possible in his kind of work. So he breaks a couple other rules to get an up close view. Seems organic to me.

[therewillbeblus]

I guess, I meant that I didn't feel like the film was as interested in exploring his character shifting, even on a minutely behavioral level, to make that feel earned. I get what it's doing pragmaterically, but its observational approach felt obfuscated rather than evocative. Again, that might be the point - to match the limitations of the character's perception with its detached style - but I found this more effective in Mank, where we're also kept at a distance from our principal character and yet the cues for how the technique informs his psychological development exists intricately in the margins. I'll have to see this again at some point, since it sounds like that's what some people praising it appear to be appreciating.

I did find one aspect interesting, though I'm not sure exactly how to engage with it as an idea. I'll start with quoting everyone's favorite critic David Ehrlich's LB "review":

The Killer is a movie about how awesome and embarrassing it must be for a 60-year-old man to live with the fact that he directed Fight Club (not at all a knock against Fight Club). I kinda loved it.

It may be an obtuse quip, yet I couldn't help but notice a fair amount of callbacks to Fight Club during my viewing. I already forget most of them - but everything from that pervasive introverted male ennui to certain details in set pieces (during the big fight scene, the fall back into the glass cabinet shattering, being a standout) seemed to be intentionally returning to the themes of that film - Though appropriately watered down, lampooned, and given less gravitas, from a filmmaker with some space and maturity between the two looking at his same interests from a new angle. Perhaps retooling a pensive attitude with less urgency and more patience. I've also come back around to appreciating Fight Club for what it is, but I'm sure with more energy to analyze them in side-by-side viewings, I'd come away with more to say and perhaps a greater respect for this film from a perspective of auteurist evolution. What straws I can grasp already makes me like it more.

[Mr Sausage]

I guess, I meant that I didn't feel like the film was as interested in exploring his character shifting, even on a minutely behavioral level, to make that feel earned.

You're right, but that's because we actually can't see his character shifting since we never see what he's like before all this. The contrast is between who he says he is and what he actually does. Disjunction rather than development. What we get is not a man changing, but a man whose conception of himself is at odds with his actual behaviour, and rather than attempt to square that he drowns his actions in a torrent of words that reaffirm, recontextualize, and narrativize instead of genuinely expressing anything. And that feels very current and human, actually. If you've ever watched a self-help rant by someone like David Goggins, this attempt to shout down reality with a limited and half-baked ideology rooted in some personal success story or other, you'll see what this hitman guy is a representation of.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I'm familiar, and that's precisely why I appreciate the connection made to Fight Club. It's certainly current, I just didn't care for how it was done so it wasn't insularly effective, but comparatively from an auteurist inspection I can see a richer film

[Mr Sausage]

I didn't love the film myself, so I'm not about to persuade you to enjoy it more. But I have been mulling over that Fight Club connection. I don't know exactly what I want to say about it yet, but the hitman's monologue is performing something like the same function as Tyler Durden, just on a less extreme and psychotic level. I think Erlich's comment is a lot less flippant than it comes across.