Defending "The Killer"

David Fincher's latest film won't win Oscars, but it's one of the best films of 2023

“The Killer” was not my favorite film of the year. It was my #2. If you haven’t read my year-end essay, which includes a proper Top 10, you can do so here. For now, please enjoy my defense of this wonderful, misunderstood film.

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“A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

That’s the quotation that opens Maestro, the ambitious but flawed biopic of Leonard Bernstein, but it applies better to David Fincher’s The Killer. It’s the most misunderstood film of the year by both critics and audiences, who apparently see no tension in its contradictions, don’t hear the questions it’s asking, and find no meaning in its deceptively complex story. I think it is the richest film of the year and maybe the best, but few agree with me. There’s something special about that. A “lonely impulse of delight,” as a poet once said.

The film’s detractors see it as one of Fincher’s strict genre exercises, a bit like Panic Room, clever and enjoyable but with no deeper rewards. In The Killer, they see Fincher returning to familiar territory—the machinations of murder—ignoring the fact that he has never made a film about a contract killer before. (He has made two films about serial killers, Seven and Zodiac.) They see a movie about a hitman who, after a job gone wrong, has to clean up his mess, kill a bunch of people, and then, for no reason at all, leave the big baddie alive at the end.

For them, I have two questions: Why would a filmmaker as sophisticated as Fincher ever make a film like that? Also, what film were you watching? From the very beginning, The Killer announces itself as a rich, complex story of a man at war with himself. It’s a tragedy about our world, and a comedy about the humans who live in it. We spend the first twenty minutes watching the Killer (he’s never named) prepare for a big job in Berlin. He has rented out an empty WeWork space so he can scout the building across the street from the hotel where his target is scheduled to be. While he waits, he lives monastically. He sleeps on a slab. He does yoga. He eats as little as he needs, buying an Egg McMuffin and then ditching the muffin part so that he can just get his protein.

Throughout it all, he explains to us in voice-over his philosophies of life. “Anticipate, don’t improvise.” “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” He cites Malcom Gladwell and forgets the names of poets he’s quoting. In other words, he’s a dudebro philosopher, a twenty-first century idiot who has read a few books and is convinced he is an original thinker. He’s not that far from Otto (Kevin Kline) in A Fish Called Wanda, who reads Nietzsche but doesn’t understand it. The Killer thinks he’s cool; flips out his retractable water cup and latches the door of his hotel room like he’s loading a gun. He brags that he has figured out a way to succeed at his job—apparently, he has a 100% track record of success—right before he inexplicably misfires, kills the wrong person, and screws up his entire life.

This, folks, is the essence of comedy. A man who insists he is a cool customer but is actually a fool. This is Austin Powers. This is Mr. Bean. There’s no doubt that this man was once good at his job; we see enough of his skills over the ensuing 100 minutes to gather he’s not a total incompetent. But once he returns home and finds that his girlfriend has been beaten nearly to death as punishment for his mistake, and he goes on a tour of vengeance to kill everyone involved, he breaks every single one of his own rules and becomes everything he hates. The funny part is that he keeps repeating those mantras to himself even as he’s breaking them. Fight only the battle you’re being paid to fight? He’s acting out of pure emotion and with no compensation whatsoever. Whether you find that funny or tragic is up to you, but there’s no way to see this as a simplistic story of a bland contract killer out for revenge.

What it’s actually about is a man who has deadened his soul through his work (who could relate?) and the rules he’s devised to support that work, and is now desperate for human contact. The Killer is actually a romantic. He tells us early on that he longs for “proximity work,” which he describes as a drowning or a strangling. If you consider that request within the world the Killer lives, it’s basically asking for a hug. You could say the same about his habit of putting the names of ‘70s and ‘80s sitcom stars on all his fake IDs. When he shows them to attendants at airports, train stations, and rental car agencies, he always looks a bit disappointed that they don’t recognize the name of Archie Bunker or Sam Malone. It’s as if he wants them to say, “Hey, Sam Malone! Like in Cheers!” For a man whose job depends on not being recognized, it qualifies as a desperate cry for connection.

Even his murders show some humanity, if you consider the moral framework in which he’s operating. He never torture his victims, or draws out their death. He says later on that knowing you’re about to die is something he wouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy, so when he kills the innocent cab driver in Costa Rica, he does it quickly. The guy never knew he was about to die. His life was just over. For a contract killer, that’s compassion. When his boss’s assistant begs him not to “disappear her” so that her children can collect her life insurance, he acquiesces, snapping her neck and pushing her down the stairs. He makes it look like an accident to save himself, but he leaves her somewhere she’ll definitely be found as a favor to her. Within the framework, that’s empathy.

Does he show empathy in the film’s climax, when he inexplicably lets the hedge fund billionaire, (known only as The Client) who paid for the botched hit and then greenlit the mission to take out the Killer’s girlfriend, walk away? Maybe. Perhaps letting someone, anyone live is progress for this guy. Or you could try the economic reading of the film. Others have noted the references to the gig economy scattered throughout the film, and the Killer’s repeated quasi-Marxist assertion that you’re either “one of the few” or “one of the many.” Maybe he lets the Client live because the many need the few to survive.

I prefer to see it as love. The Killer has, slowly over the course of the film, learned to open up. He killed with compassion. He got his much-desired “proximity work,” engaging in vicious hand-to-hand combat with an assailant in Florida. He got a taste of what a normal life for a contract killer could look like when he sat down with the Expert (Tilda Swinton), while in the midst of a fine dinner.  Maybe the Killer found some part of his humanity worth saving. Killing the Client would have certainly brought more scrutiny onto him—he notes earlier in the film that when rich people get murdered, the cops seem to look into it more—but it also would have been the first time he killed without purpose as he had sufficiently scared the Client by showing up in his apartment unannounced.. And that kill would have been crossing a line, within the framework in which he operates. The Killer wanted to enjoy his life back in Costa Rica with a woman he clearly loves and enough money to last several lifetimes. That’s a classic happy ending for a man who deserves one. Even if I’m the only one on the planet who believes that.