David Fincher’s horribly addictive samurai procedural, adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker from the graphic novel by Alexis Nolent, stars Michael Fassbender as the un-named titular hitman: an ascetic who in the movie’s sensationally low-key opening sequence tells us about dealing with the job’s biggest challenge: boredom. He internally monologues on this subject, and many others, including his views on the amorality of the universe and the music of the Smiths, while sitting high up in a rented WeWork office space with his long-range rifle, next to a five-star Paris hotel, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the VIP guest to show up in the suite opposite and get a bullet in the head.
But despite the killer’s cool and pitiless rigour, his elaborate discipline and impressive yoga postures, something goes terribly wrong just for no reason at all; the wealthy, ruthless and now angrily disappointed people who commissioned the killer will now want to kill him so he will have to kill them. Now he says there is a new maxim: WWJWBD: What Would John Wilkes Booth Do?
The killer’s fanatically focused rearguard action for his own survival takes him from Paris to the Dominican Republic (where he has a remote luxury hacienda) to New Orleans – where he must meet with the law professor who recruited him into this business in the first place – to Florida and then New York and then Chicago to meet with the cryptocurrency baron paying for everything. The result is violence interspersed with the dreamlike business of disguise and track-covering, the endless false names, by which he is smilingly greeted at airline ticket counters and rental car booths; there are innumerable lockups and countless storage units which hold his weapons, cash and fake passports.
It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting: can it really be true that you can get through an electronic keyfob-protected door just by photographing it on your phone and then ordering a fob-copier from Amazon? Maybe it is.
Students of Frederick Forsyth and the Jackal have been using the fake passport dodge for decades and in any case know that even if the details aren’t strictly speaking correct, their sheer profusion has something absorbing and even erotic about it. We see the killer buy a lot of specific items at a supermarket, say, and only in the next scene learn how they are to be used; this delay in learning creates its own narrative tension and jeopardy. And Fincher breaks out the action-thriller sweat when the killer is set upon - generally while he has taken his eye off the ball by mentally intoning his rules of discipline - and there is a ferocious punch-up, including one which takes place in front of a TV surreally showing Fiona Bruce.
And why is the killer doing it all anyway? When did he think he was going to get a chance to relax and enjoy all this money? Could it be that he has no imagination and all the cash and weaponry he has stockpiled has always been, unconsciously, intended for this kind of self-annihilating kamikaze mission? Or will the calamity show him the way out of this mess? This is a thriller of pure surface and style and managed with terrific flair and Fassbender’s careworn, inscrutable face is just right for it.
• The Killer screened at the Venice film festival; it is released in October in US and UK cinemas and is released on 10 November on Netflix.
