By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

Following his Old Hollywood passion project Mank, director David Fincher returns to the thriller genre with The Killer, a slickly crafted adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s French graphic novel exploring the daily grind of a professional assassin.

Fincher’s film opens with its unnamed titular assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) staying at an abandoned WeWork office building in Paris, waiting for the perfect moment to take out a target.

Fassbender’s character often remains stoically silent, his inner thoughts being spoken aloud through existential voiceover. He informs us that he doesn’t ask questions about his work, and just takes the money offered to him by his clients.

This isn’t really a complex narrative; in fact, it’s almost impressively stripped down to the basics. A near-miss happens, which sends Fassbender’s killer on a place-hopping mission to tie up loose ends. The film unfolds with an episodic story structure across a half-dozen chapters, with a pretty straight-forward “man on a mission” plot. It’s all about setting a tone; the lonely, ironic life of being a high level hit man, making millions of dollars but having to stay hidden, able to go anywhere, but always as a different person.

The film’s depth is found in the title killer’s crisis of faith, which comes across through Fassbender’s exceedingly droll voiceover. The screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker (who also wrote Fincher’s breakout film Se7en) is laced with sardonic, pitch black humour as the character narrates his moves, and listens to English pop band The Smiths as part of his killing playlist to keep himself focused.

If The Killer seems like relatively minor Fincher, it’s an entertaining assassin thriller that is infused with style and laced with a surprising amount of dark humour, while delivering some bracing violence when it needs to. On a technical level, it’s a piece of precise, accomplished filmmaking, from the steely look of the film courtesy of Fincher’s go-to cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, to the score by his frequent collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that provides pulsing accompaniment. This is mixed with some exceptional sound design and clever auditory tricks (songs sound muffled when heard through headphones, and are heard clearly when the perspective shifts).

The first chapter is the strongest, with hints of Hitchcock’s Rear Window in its staging as it establishes the film’s methodical, suspenseful pacing. Later on, in another standout sequence, Fassbender engages in a gripping back-and-forth with Tilda Swinton that balances tension with darkly funny absurdity. It’s a very lean film, as smooth and cold as its central character. Fassbender is the perfect match for Fincher’s calculated style, with his calmly intense portrayal of an assassin on a mission to set things right keeping us engaged throughout.

The Killer opens in select theatres on October 27th, and will be available to stream exclusively on Netflix as of November 10th.