In short: The Killer (2023)

A professional killer (Michael Fassbender) botches an assassination attempt. After his middle-man sends people to his home that brutalize his partner, the Killer works his way up to his actual employer.

There’s really very little plot or direct characterization to David Fincher’s The Killer. Fassbender’s character is highly self-contained – or empty – except for a monologue that very pointedly does not really analyse or comment on what’s going on, even though it at first appear to do so. Rather, the repetitious monologue in his head is just another method the Killer uses not to have to connect with the world, to “stay in the moment” in the most nihilist way imaginable, just as he uses his own private The Smiths soundtrack for the same thing.

Everything we learn about the man’s actual inner life, or what little there is of it, the film shows us via the breaks in his facades, the physical injuries that begin to roughen up his slickness, and the way his actual deeds often are exactly the opposite of what his inner monologue never stops repeating. That this works as well as it does has a lot to do with focus: like the character at his best/worst (performance/morals), Fincher’s direction here is fastidious, neat and tidy, absolutely focussed on showing the things his main characters is not telling by insinuation, while always keeping up the appearance of this being a simple straightforward thriller.

This contrast between what we’re told we are seeing and what we are actually seeing does lend the film a surprisingly strong thread of humour. It’s a pretty grim sense of humour, of course, but that’s the only fitting kind of humour for this sort of thing – there’s something inherently funny about a guy telling himself quite as many lies as the Killer does, and a film presenting these lies with such a straight face, but murder is still murder. There’s some conceptual humour here as well: the Smiths as the best soundtrack to assassinate people to, the way the Killer’s philosophy mixes crap nihilism (the kind of nihilism only good for excusing one’s own shittiness with the shittiness of the world or universe) with wellness lingo that suggests a future influencer career for the Killer are things that not just work as elements of showing us a character but are also pretty great jokes, when you think about them for a minute.