It seems like Netflix is specializing in made for streaming movies with extremely limited theater runs about contract killers. At least if we consider two recent offerings: Richard Linklater’s Hitman and David Fincher’s The Killer (2023).
Actually, the two films aren’t very similar. I’ve already discussed Hitman, where the protagonist isn’t even a real contract killer but an undercover quasi-cop pretending to be one. The killer in The Killer is a bona fide killer. In fact, as played by Michael Fassbender, he’s one of cinema’s most ruthless hitmen, at least for a protagonist (when it comes to villains, it would be hard to list the endless variety of psychopaths portrayed over the years).
The killer, whose real name we never learn, uses a long list of pseudonyms, one of the movie’s few borderline amusing aspects. Although we see him in action, we mostly hear his inner dialogue, accompanied by a Smiths soundtrack.
It could be tedious to hear someone repeating various Nietzschean and Machiavellian quotes (along with one by Aleister Crowley), but here it’s actually compelling. Many of the words are repetitive, but we’re interested to see how (and if) the killer acts them out in each scenario.
As the killer meticulously prepares to do a job in Paris, he makes a mistake and shoots a bystander instead of the target. This sets off a messy sequence of events that throws off his equilibrium. As you might imagine, people who hire contract killers aren’t likely to forgive mistakes. They attack his home in the Dominican Republic and maim his girlfriend. The assassins, however, make their own mistake and leave her alive and able to identify them.
The killer, it turns out, isn’t too cold and calculating to resist the lure of revenge. So most of the film follows him as he tracks down each and every culpable party. He continues to repeat his mantra: “Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”
As his actions clearly don’t fit this stoic ideal, he almost seems like a malfunctioning android or Terminator, functioning at a high and deadly level, but not quite the way he was programmed to work. Tilda Swinton has a nice role as a charismatic fellow assassin who is on the killer’s list. They play a life-and-death game of cat and mouse over drinks at a restaurant.
We get no backstory for the killer. Did he watch his family get murdered as a child? Was he mentored by a fellow sociopath? We have no idea as we only see him as a finished product.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the 1967 French classic Le Samouraï, but that film similarly portrays a lone wolf, hard-to-kill hitman on the run.
The Killer brings an intense energy to a familiar genre. It alternates between action and slower-paced brooding scenes. While not exactly groundbreaking -a hitman seeking revenge is a familiar trope-, for fans of arty-Euro style suspense, it’s worth a watch.