David Fincher makes waiting and watching feel dangerous. We rate his patience and precision, but The Killer shows the limit: the work can be absorbing even when there is little beneath it.
Fi1m perspective
In The Killer (2023), Michael Fassbender waits in an empty Paris office, does yoga and listens to The Smiths while preparing to shoot a man across the street. Fincher makes the waiting absorbing and the assassin's solemn rules faintly ridiculous. The film is lean, dry and worth an evening, though its interest in the man scarcely extends beyond his working habits. Fincher has often made procedure compelling; here, we wish he had given it a little more purpose.
After his feature debut, Alien 3 (1992), Se7en (1995) established his thriller style, with Andrew Kevin Walker providing the screenplay. Fight Club (1999) pursued masculinity and consumerism through a non-linear story. Zodiac (2007) gave patient investigation a larger subject: a city's fear across a decade. The sustained tension of The Social Network (2010) and the misdirection of Gone Girl (2014) show how much he can do with that control. Returning to procedure in The Killer, he strips away too much of what made Zodiac matter.
That precision is shared work. Fincher's collaborators include cinematographers Jeff Cronenweth and Erik Messerschmidt, editor Kirk Baxter, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and production designer Donald Graham Burt. The controlled camera movements and clinical lighting suit his thrillers. They keep our attention on people absorbed in tasks, watching and checking. The risk is that we stop caring about those people, particularly when a film spends as much time explaining its protagonist's methods as The Killer does.
The smaller film also shows why control need not mean a fixed camera. During its fight sequence, Fincher goes handheld and close, with almost no music to soften the blows. We flinched because the impacts sound painfully solid, and for those minutes we feared for a man the film had kept at a distance. Walker's repeated voiceover is less successful: what begins as a joke about self-importance keeps returning after we have understood it. Start with Zodiac; save The Killer for an evening when a well-made thriller is enough.
Biography
David Fincher is an American film director. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1962, he began his career in the 1980s directing music videos and commercials before making his feature debut with Alien 3 (1992).
He is known for directing thrillers including Se7en (1995), Fight Club (1999), Zodiac (2007), The Social Network (2010), Gone Girl (2014), Mank (2020) and The Killer (2023). Fincher has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director.
