David Fincher’s Netflix thriller The Killer is a big, brilliant setup with no payoff

polygon.com:

This review of David Fincher’s The Killer comes from the film’s premiere at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival. The film will be released on Netflix in November.

David Fincher’s latest movie — a Netflix adaptation of the French graphic novel series The Killer — is nihilistic in the most recursive, reductive sense. Its search for meaning hits dead end after dead end. While that’s part of its artistic credo, it’s incredibly frustrating to watch it meander around numerous bends, finding only the tiniest handful of exciting or bleakly funny scenes. What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.

The only truly electric thing about The Killer is the live-wire opening credits. The sequence is a throwback to the kind of grimy, impressionistic montages of textures and details that Fincher cemented in the popular consciousness with Seven, which eventually became shorthand for “this is a procedural.” From there, the movie quickly transitions into a methodical, observational first act, following an anonymous assassin (Michael Fassbender) on a job in Paris.

There, he perches in an abandoned WeWork office, across the street from a lavish penthouse. With his target nowhere to be seen, he finds ways to pass the time, as he recounts his meticulous methodology in ritualistic voice-over, not unlike Harmony Korine assassin movie Aggro Dr1ft, only sans the hallucinogens. Sitting alone, he tells the audience how he severs himself from empathy and keenly keeps his eyes on the prize.

But his assertions have plenty of holes. He’s constantly distracted while surveilling his subject’s home — his gaze falls on other windows and people on the