'The Killer' and David Fincher's Feet

One thing that’s abundantly clear from the films of Quentin Tarantino’s is that he is into feet. It’s honestly pretty harmless as far as obsessions go. What’s funny is that there’s a cycle of Tarantino releasing a movie, having a scene that features feet, a round of commentary noting the feet thing, and then in the next film you get an even more aggressive foot scene. By the time you’ve reached Tarantino’s ninth (and by his own claim, penultimate, movie), you’re here. Tarantino knows what you’re saying, and he’s leaning into it even harder.

David Fincher is like that except instead of feet, it’s about being cold, methodical, and process-oriented.

Fincher is well-aware of his rep among audiences. People like his movies, but he’s also the guy known for doing so many takes that he sounded off on it in the Gone Girl commentary track. He also is a director who loves order so much that even an anarchist guy like Tyler Durden is a guy with rules about his club, homework assignments, and detailed plans for how to crash the economy. You can blow everything up, but you’re not going to figure it out on the day. The devil is in the details, and planning is everything.

If Fincher’s previous film, Mank, was a love letter to his father Jack Fincher (who received a posthumous screenplay credit), then his new movie, The Killer, is arguably a love letter to himself. It is Fincher fully owning who and what he is, which is a guy with a wicked sense of humor who loves thrillers, and relishes the darkest aspects of humanity. The protagonist of the film, the eponymous “The Killer” (we never get his real name), played by Michael Fassbender, feels like a compatriot of Fincher’s. Fincher may not condone murder, but he would certainly appreciate the loving attention to method rooted in a deep sense of nihilism, misanthropy, and scraping out whatever bleak existence you can with a wink and a grin.

Plotwise, The Killer is as barebones of a plot as you can get: a hitman is on assignment, the hit goes wrong (the film’s first big joke is a guy who prides himself on precision misses his target), his employers try to nix him, so he goes out to eliminate the people who are after him. That’s it. That’s the movie.

Stripping the plot down to its bare essentials lets Fincher relish the character of The Killer and the world he inhabits. It also lets us see the distance between who The Killer thinks he is (as we gather from his long voice overs) and who he actually is (a guy that’s trying his best, and is quite good, but things still go wrong). Even his motivations are paradoxical at best and hypocritical at worst. He claims that life is largely meaningless and empathy is weakness, but his entire mission is to avenge the harm done to the woman he loves, and protect her and himself from those that seek to kill them. The Killer thinks of himself as a cold pragmatist, but his actions, taste in music (he’s a big The Smiths fan), and Fassbender’s subtle performance betray an emotional core. He’s someone who aspires to be a sociopath, but can’t quite get all the way there.

Watching The Killer, I was reminded of a joke from 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank where John Cusack’s hitman is trying to explain to his childhood love why he’s not crazy. “No, no. Psychopaths kill for no reason,” he says. “I kill for money. It's a job…That didn't come out right.” In The Killer, Fincher seems to relish this awkward distinction, and doesn’t have any trouble painting The Killer as any different from the serial killers who inhabit Fincher’s other movies or his TV series Mindhunter. There are even scenes, especially at night, that look like they could be plucked right out of the Netflix drama. The only meaningful difference between John Doe (Kevin Spacey) in Se7en and The Killer are outcomes, but they both relish process with a fetishistic devotion. On some level, for Fincher, the “why” is ultimately irrelevant because in the grand scheme of things, everything is meaningless. That only leaves you with “how” and that’s what’s worth pursuing.

The Killer takes this notion to a darkly comic extent. For some, this approach is bound to leave you cold. The lead character is unsympathetic, his actions (especially at the end) don’t seem to make sense given everything we’ve seen to this point, and how compelling can a movie be if it’s just about process? But looking at Fincher’s overall filmography, process is his passion. He’s the guy who wants to get things just so (hence the copious amounts of takes and heavy use of green screen rather than shooting on location). Watching The Killer, I was frequently reminded of Fincher’s 2002 film Panic Room. Panic Room is proudly a Friday-night date movie, but the star of the film isn’t Jodie Foster. It’s the house that Fincher constructed on a backlot so he could have total control of the environment. The Killer is simply if the house was a person.

Fincher’s magic trick is taking something cold and remote like a house or a serial killer, and making them compelling. In an age of superheroes where we’re told that characters have to be likable and morally uplifting, Fincher fully rejects that kind of warmth and positivity in favor of distant weirdo geniuses who can see everything clearly except themselves. If Mank is a movie about what we leave behind (in addition to being a script from Fincher’s own father, the movie is about the legacies of various power players of the early 1940s), then The Killer is about where Fincher is now, and arguably has been ever since his awful experience making Alien 3. He puts his identity and his interests fully on display in a genre (thrillers about killers) that he loves.

While Fincher may see such a parallel as “weak-minded,” we can ultimately only judge him on the films he makes and how he chooses to make them. Did the idea of another Friday-night date movie appeal to him after the efforts of Mank and Mindhunter? Perhaps, but I’ve seen all of Fincher’s movies as well as his music videos and commercials, and no one else would have made The Killer in this way with its particular emphases. No other living filmmaker (with maybe the exception of Christopher Nolan) is as exacting and as proud as of his precision. Rather than run from such a comparison, I’d say Fincher should just own it, but The Killer shows he’s already there.

The Killer opens in select theaters on Friday, October 28th, and arrives on Netflix on Friday, November 10th.