ReviewVenice 2023: The Killer movie review – David Fincher returns to lurid crime thriller territory with Michael Fassbender as his assassin

Michael Fassbender’s assassin becomes a target for his paymasters after botching a job in Paris. To protect his girlfriend he hunts them down across the US

Fincher is back on familiar terrain here, and Fassbender excels, in a movie with reminders of The Day of the Jackal and the director’s own masterpiece Se7en

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Michael Fassbender in a still from “The Killer”, David Fincher’s lurid crime thriller that has echoes of the director’s 1995 masterpiece “Se7en”. Photo: Netflix

Published: 1:30am, 4 Sep 2023Updated: 7:44am, 4 Sep 2023

4/5 stars

After his dip into Hollywood’s Golden Age with Mank, David Fincher is back on more familiar terrain with The Killer. Premiering in competition at the Venice International Film Festival, it’s a lurid crime thriller that, to some degree, chimes with Fincher’s 1995 masterpiece Se7en.

Both are scripted by Andrew Kevin Walker, who here adapts a French graphic novel by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent. Even the credits, glimpses of various methods of execution, recall the innovative opening from Se7en, when the killer is preparing his crimes.

In The Killer, Fincher strips back to the bone. Michael Fassbender returns to our screens as a hitman who, when the story opens, is staking out a target in Paris.

The influence of French-set films like The Day of the Jackal and Le Samouraï is evident here, as Fassbender’s unnamed killer unpacks his ethos in an extensive voice-over in which he suggests that “weakness is vulnerability” and that you should “fight only the battle you’re paid to fight”.

Like a tiger, he stalks for his prey for days, coiled and ready to pounce.