2023-12-07 16:44:34
David Fincher comes to reclaim his crown as master of crime fiction but constantly slips away. It creates a strange, atmospheric film, a mental thriller where words wreak more havoc than bullets.
He is a visionary, an architect of dreams, an incredible inventor of forms who has created some of the most beautiful hypnoses of the 7e art : Fight Club, Zodiac, Se7en, Millenium… But for the past ten years, David Fincher has become Netflix’s employee of the month, producing the series Mindhunter or the failed biopic Lack. Still for Netflix, he is today adapting a French comic book, The killer, the story of a methodical hitman who screws up a contract and finds himself pursued by a horde of enemies. “ A comic book with a killer and gruesome murders, we thought it was for me… », assures Fincher, curling up. Except that Fincher transforms this B-movie material into something much more ambitious, a mental thriller that delves into the head of a sociopath disguised as a German tourist, who repeats his mantra ad nauseam (“ Stick to your plan – Trust no one »).
Screenwriter of Se7en, Andrew Kevin Walker focuses on the killer’s stream of consciousness, laying out all his thoughts, with a voice-over that’s close to dizzying. But is the killer trying to persuade himself or is he lying to himself? And why is he only breaking his own rules? From then on, Fincher shot his film. It expands time, multiplies the waiting periods, plays on the viewer’s frustration. During the first twenty minutes in Paris, it shows Michael Fassbender waiting for days for his target, doing yoga, setting up and taking down his gun, and saturates the soundtrack with songs from The Smiths, complete with Michael Fassbender’s robotic voice-over. Not sure that the action fan made in Netflix will appreciate it too much…
CHAOS A COW
To give a framework to the chaos, Fincher divides his film into six chapters and changes continents like the killer changes his passport. We are in France, then in the Dominican Republic, in Florida, in the jungle, in New Orleans… Reality is distorted, as for the hero of Fight Club, the world is shrinking. The killer moves up the food chain, but instead of shooting his adversaries at all costs, the spectacular scenes transform into verbal duels where there is endless talk about money, capitalism, and we even tell the old joke of the hunter and the sodomite bear. Fincher injects a dose of very dark humor (“ If you’re not able to endure boredom, this work is not for you “), and its staging achieves thermonuclear power, which culminates with a titanic fight sequence in the Florida night, with an apocalyptic sound design.
If David Fincher assures that his inspiration comes from Don Siegel, it seems obvious that The Killer is his most Kubrickian film, with accents of Full Metal Jacket. His characters have no past, no future, no psychology, Fincher refuses obligatory sequences, plays with the geometric hell of the setting, leans into the duality of man (“ the jungian thing “, as Matthew Modine said) and offers the last scene to Arliss Howard, the interpreter of Cowboy in FMJ. Failing to be a monolith, The Killer is a pure gem in Fincher’s film, a black diamond, enhanced by Fassbender’s performance.
THE KILLER
DAVID FINCHER
ON NETFLIX, FROM NOVEMBER 10
By Marc Godin
1702186403
#Film #month #Killer