David Fincherrose to prominence with crime thrillers that revolved around a range of sociopaths, serial killers, and vicious antagonists, but it took him 30 years to finally make a movie from the perspective of an assassin. His latest movie,The Killer, follows Michael Fassbender as a methodical and perfectionist hitman, who enters a personal crisis in the aftermath of a fateful mistake. With deadly enemies and his own demons catching up to him, he engages in an international manhunt.
Fincher is now one of the most respected filmmakers of his time, but things weren’t always that way. Hisdebut feature,Aliens 3,was poorly received by both the critics and the public audience. Before becoming a cult classic,Fight Clubfailed at the box office and was severely misunderstood. Nowadays, Fincher is going through a process of reexamining his style, and finally introducing a serial killer as the protagonist of his new movie says a lot about the way he perceives his own career.
The Killer
How Fincher Found His Voice in Morally Ambiguous Stories
Although Fincher made his feature debut withAliens 3, carrying on Ridley Scott’s legacy, he went in a completely different direction than sci-fi, releasing three career-defining crime thrillers in the late-90s:Se7en, The Game, andFight Club. Though highly divergent movies in nature, these three projects share controversial characters and morally ambiguous stories in common. InSe7en, more than offering a traditional battle between good and evil, Fincher introduces his so-called “heroes” and then proceeds to unleash the worst part of their souls as they pursue a merciless serial killer.
What makesSe7ensuch an unconventional serial killer film is how the movie is more interested in the result rather than the method. That’s why the villain only shows up in the final minutes, to deliver his gut-wrenching final masterpiece. Morgan Freeman’s character, Detective Somerset, is old and has seen too much; Brad Pitt’s Detective Mills is young and reckless. Together, they represent two sides of the same coin in a society that is way beyond the point of salvation. In this context, one must either patiently accept evil’s aggressive force and bypass it without a word, or in the case of Mills, get caught in its temptation and embrace the darkest impulses.
The perpetually hopeless, melancholic mood ofSe7enis present in every other crime thriller Fincher has directed. His stories constantly bring heroes and villains together in a similar exhibition of action and virtue; no better way to illustrate that thanFight Club, when the Narrator and Tyler Durden merge into each other in one of thebest plot twistsof all time.
Different from other filmmakers, Fincher isn’t interested solely in the action. He’s equally invested in the exhaustion, the frustration, and the desperation of his characters. All of his movies are a gradual process of burnout, and inThe Killer, he finally switches the narrative’s perspective as a way to respond to everything he created up to this point.
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The Killer Is a Response to a Filmography Built on the Crime Genre
The Killerexplores the bureaucracy of crime, and how the same arduous labor conducted by law enforcers applies to those who are dedicated to doing evil. Taking Fincher’sZodiacas an example: the movie is a dramatization of the exhausting investigation behind the Zodiac killer, who terrorized northern California in the ’70s and provoked the police with multiple encrypted messages. While the film is entirely focused on the dead-end alley the detectives find themselves in, engaging in a vicious cycle of paranoia and exasperation,The Killerinduces the audience to watchZodiacwith different eyes.
Fincher’s latest movie showcases that the Zodiac might have engaged in an equally burdensome work as that of the police to execute all those attacks, encrypt the messages, and stay out of the detectives' radar. The infamous serial killer even made the mistake of letting two people escape, similar to what happened to Fassbender’s character inThe Killer.
However, what really makesFincher’s approach inThe Killerso effective is how cynical he is. While he proposes this controversial meditation on how exhaustive it is to do evil, he’s not trying to influence viewers to regard the Killer, the Zodiac assassin, or Tyler Durden with empathy — no, he’s actually mocking them.
Building a legacy over morally ambiguous characters has its downsides, thanks mostly to the audience’s tendency to misinterpret things. For years now,Fight Clubis still regarded by many as an entrancing anarchic statement, while all the film is doing is poking fun at the effects of a consumerist and self-obsessed society on toxic masculinity. Fincher should not have to explain that, and he never did. Instead, he made a whole movie about how the biggest loser on Earth might as well be that relentless anti-hero audiences like to model themselves after.
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The Killer Was 20 Years in the Making
Fincher’s wish to adaptThe Killerto the big screen dates back to 2007, when he first got his hands on Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon’s graphic novel. Things were moving fast: the rights were acquired by Plan B, Fincher’s long-term collaborator Brad Pitt was eyed for the lead role, and Fincher was set to direct the movie. The first draft of a script even got to see the light of day, and the base story was set to be agame of cat and mousebetween the Killer and a hyper-focused detective, quite reminiscent of Fincher’sSe7enandZodiac. However, since Fincher was immersed in the promotion ofThe Curious Case of BenjaminButton at the time, the rights to the graphic novel lapsed and returned to the authors.
It wasn’t until 2015 thatThe Killerwas brought up once again by Fincher, who wanted Andrew Kevin Walker,Se7en’s screenwriter, on board to write the script. It was the perfect timing for Fincher to shoot a movie likeThe Killersince his deal with Netflix enabled full creative freedom. Pitt was long cut off from their plans since the actor himself claimed the main character was “a little too nihilistic” to him, and, thankfully, Fassbender came up as someone who was willing to truly embrace that aspect of the character.StreamThe Killeron Netflix
