Netflix enters the award season race with its brutal, sometimes painful-to-watch thriller The Killer. The limited release film (it’s merely getting a week in a small number of theaters to qualify for awards, and to make a point) debuted on Netflix this past weekend to strong reviews, particularly praising the directing and acting in this powerful slow-burning action-driven story.
The Killer is penned by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven, Sleepy Hollow), directed by David Fincher (Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club, The Social Network), and stars Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave, the X-Men franchise, Hunger, Prometheus), adapting a graphic novel series Le Tueur from author Matz (aka Alexis Nolent) and artist Luc Jacamon.
That’s some impressive pedigree, all right. With a straightforward cat-and-mouse revenge plot, the real thrills come from watching Fassbender’s tightly wound performance as his titular assassin reminds himself of his professional code and rules, even while he increasingly violates every single one of them in an apocalyptic eruption of coldly passionate vengeance.
While I usually don’t care for voiceover narration (in most cases, I feel it is either a lazy way to convey exposition, or it is overwritten and steps on the scenes), Fassbender delivers Walker’s lines with precisely the right understated detachment, walking a thin line which perches him right between signs of boiling emotion and empty-hearted sociopathy, and just a twitch or gaze tips the balance — barely perceptibly — to one direction or the other. It’s a nuanced, bold performance.
And yet it’s also wonderful camp in a way, akin to Roger Moore’s 007 knowingly stoically climbing and firing his pistol as each situation became more absurd and implausible — as did his own presence in it all. But whereas Moore would often wink at us to let us know he was in on the joke, too, Fassbender never lets on that it’s a gag. He takes this very seriously, it’s deadly stuff after all. Fassbender displays almost a weariness at the escalation and gruesomeness of his life and work even while he chooses to push it to its limits, and then grounds the story again with his investment to the character’s worldview and reality.
Fincher’s directing is as pitch-perfect as ever. His attention to detail and how each small element can add to the tension and sense of place, his almost transcendent awareness and subtle manipulation of pacing, the way he brings out the best in his cast, is all an impressive display that begs the question: how the hell is he still getting better at this? Still at the top of his game in his favorite playground, Fincher puts on a master class in thriller filmmaking, keeping things simmering and sizzling just beneath the surface until they violently erupt into the open and upend lives.
Watch Fassbender’s eyes closely in scenes where he’s sleeping — his eyes are moving, it’s REM sleep. When he wakes up quickly and turns off his alarm, notice the time on it. Never once does he discuss sleep patterns or the reasoning behind his “naps,” but he drives home the necessity of getting plenty of good sleep to stay mentally sharp. But he seems not to sleep through the night, instead taking several naps throughout the day.
This is a specific type of so-called “uberman” sleep schedule to force the body to rapidly fall into REM sleep — the kind we need most, and get roughly 90 minutes of per night within around 7-8 hours of average sleep. Some people can adapt to taking several long naps broken up during the day, instead of being awake all day and then sleeping through the whole night. It forces the body to fall almost instantly into REM sleep, so that three or four deep naps like this can serve the purpose of providing necessary sleep, allowing more than 20 hours of waking, productive time every day.
That’s the theory, anyway, and it seems Fassbender’s character employs this concept. The film never says so, however, and this is symbolic of much else about the film — even the precise nature of his [unnamed] character’s relationship with the only people in the film who seem to “matter” to him is left undefined, we are merely shown how they reside within these relationships and their world, and left to draw conclusions from the scattershot information we have.
Which adds to the feel of a pre-existing, lived-in world. In a film of this sort, that goes a long way, because often such films can feel overly stylized to the point of creating a sterile, bland experience. Even the choices of fake identities used to navigate the criminal underworld and move through “normie” society (as the regular daily world of ordinary people is referred to in the film) contributes flavor and subtext to various travel scenes and their preceding or subsequent sequences.
So many action thrillers sport a supposedly unflinching killer who tears through a gaggle of threats, to get to someone “at the top” of whatever conspiracy serves as entry point for a series of high-speed chases and bloody fights, and leave absolutely no impression whatsoever on the viewer and offer no insights or even a sense that it was particularly well put together. The Killer is what happens when you take that sort of setup and framework, and put it in the hands of master craftspersons and artists who elevate every aspect of the production so that the whole becomes ever greater than the sum of its parts.
You might call this a “thinking person’s John Wick,” not to imply the John Wick films are empty-headed, but they aren’t setting out to make movies you talk about as potential Oscar contenders even before they’re released — they’re great at what they are, which is adrenaline-fueled vehicles for cool popcorn entertainment.
The Killer, however, cares more about the implications of killing and the lies we tell ourselves about our choices and our mistakes, and present its story in a way that imbues the slowest moments with importance and mounting tension, and allows action to feel painful and disturbing until you want it to stop. It is actioner as high art.
But wait, is The Killer in fact a real movie? It was produced by and released by Netflix
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Worse still, The Killer is adapted from a French comic book series, a genre which is likewise denied status as true cinema by those powerful established directorial voices. So it seems The Killer has a double-whammy against it as not even being a real movie or true art in the first place.
Before you roll your eyes at me, at least answer the question. Is it or is it not a real movie? Is it or is it not true cinema and art? Because if you agree with those voices claiming streaming movies and comic book adaptations are not true art or cinema, you can’t dismiss my point that it would apply to The Killer, to David Fincher, and to Michael Fassbender.
Of course The Killer is a real movie, it is true cinema, and it is art, despite also being a streaming movie adapting a comic book series (whether we personally like the film or not is irrelevant). Speaking about art in broad terms to disparage genres and those who work in it is wrong, and a more careful and considered approach to discussing the issues at hand would work much better and in fact find a lot of agreement among those of us tired of the lazy, shallow, and utterly false aspersions cast on genres, mediums, and artists.
The Killers is not likely to wind up as a frontrunner at the Oscars for above the line categories (film editing and sound editing, however, could show the film some love). But with such powerful storytelling and performances, it’s definitely worth watching, definitely well made and impressive, and will probably garner some awards talk and a possible nomination for Fassbender’s performance. Netflix once again demonstrates any pretense that films made and distributed by streamers are every bit as cinematic, and every bit as much true films, as anything being made by their detractors.
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